Our prime minister has dilly-dallyed for months over whether or not to go to a city, Glasgow, (host of the looming COP26 United Nations Climate Change conference) this columnist will revisit in a trice when next given the chance.
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With COP26 approaching, the magic-to-my-ears word ''Glasgow'' (say it loud and there's music playing) is everywhere in the news media. I never hear it spoken without feeling (perhaps in a sophisticated human version of the way in which Pavlov's dogs would involuntarily salivate at the ringing of a bell) a soul-twanging buzz of affection for the city the name labels.
In Scott Morrison's shoes (but wearing my own mind) I would have begun packing for Glasgow (leaving out my cherished lump of coal) and counting the sleeps to COP26 (it opens on October 31) months ago.
Well-travelled readers will know the emotion I am describing, the eerie (and perhaps deliciously irrational) way in which some places one visits indelibly embed themselves in the memory and the heart. In my case, already half Scottish, I was already well-disposed towards Glasgow before going and spending a stimulating week there in recent pre-COVID times.
It occurs to me as a Canberran that some of the overseas holidaying a thinking Canberran does is done as a kind of respite from life in Canberra. We find ourselves (perhaps unconsciously) going to cities as unlike Canberra as possible.
Yes, one is contented for most of the time to live in this most comfortable and undemanding and clean and tidy and ultraplanned of first-world cities. But somehow grazing is not enough and the thinker is haunted by the thought that there should be more to city life than just the urban equivalent of being a contented NIMBY cow in a perfect meadow of grass of a government-planted, government-maintained, government-guaranteed greenness and lushness. And so the thinking Canberran hankers for the experience of life in a real and gritty city bristling with the qualities (disorder and diversity and chaos, exciting surprises of sight and smell and human interactions, eccentricities and excesses of architecture, etc.) that true cities supply.
My week in Glasgow, a true, broad-shouldered, excitingly flawed, grittily majestic city, did me a power of Canberraness-curing good.
Again, in Scott Morrison's shoes I would be feverishly packing for Glasgow while making sure (even if I had to wear a statesman-hiding disguise to do it) I take ample time away from the inconsequential conference to visit the city's great galleries, museums, parks and gardens and pubs.
And its football matches. One of my zillion fond memories of Glasgow is of our going to the home game of unfashionable Partick Thistle FC and of finding my consort and I seated in a grandstand among hundreds of Billy Connollys (Billy is famously, indelibly, triumphantly Glaswegian).
How we enjoyed the musicality of the Scots' heavily-accented crowd noises and of the amiable conversation with us of the Billy Connollys sat immediately around us!
So prime minister, once in Glasgow and given that the conference itself will be of very little interest to you (for as a Pentecostalist you believe that everything the climate does to our planet is God's almighty will with nothing we poor sinners should be impudent enough to meddle with) I urge you to get out and about in Glasgow.
Go out and meet its unique people. Allow yourself to be vibrated by the great city's character-building vibes. And as a fanatical footy fan (albeit of another code) you're in luck! Unfashionable Partick Thistle FC (a kind of struggling Cronulla-Sutherland of the North) have a home game in Glasgow against Caledonian Thistle FC (how authentically Scottish all these thistles!) while you're in town ostensibly for COP26!
So, Mr Morrison, for a true Glaswegian experience, sneak away from the trivial conference. From the inner city take the number 17 bus to Firhill (Thistle's modest stadium is there) and (throwing off your disguise at the turnstiles for no one there will know or care who the prime minister of Australia is) ensconce yourself among Thistle's characterful Billy Connollyesque fans.
Meanwhile back in town at COP26 the climate miserabilists, not knowing how to have fun in a big city, will be agonising over the finding of IPBES (the UN's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) that the changing climate now has one million plant and animal species teetering on the brink of extinction.
But why worry when all of these sorts of things, surely even the result of Partick Thistle's match that you are rapturously attending, are in God's hands?
