Edvard Munch's The Scream (featuring the second most famous face in all of art) has just been auctioned at Sotheby's in New York for $120 million. There was an ''anonymous purchaser''. One waits with crossed fingers to see if it was Clive Palmer, the sensitive aesthete, buying it for our National Gallery.
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The Readers: ''Ian, we notice there's no mention of Professor Richard Dawkins so far this week. We've been enjoying that series. Do you plan to bring him in later on?''
The Columnist: ''I wasn't going to, no. He's gone home to Oxford.''
The (plaintive) Readers: ''Ian, please report one more of your riveting conversations with him. They've become the highlight of our humdrum week.''
The Columnist: ''OK, I'll give him a last guernsey in a moment. Meanwhile, everyone knows The Scream and perhaps some of its universal appeal is that all of us identify with the urge, almost always kept bottled-up, to scream aloud with primal anguish.
''Lots of us would like to scream aloud in a public place about, say, the awfulness of the Gillard prime ministership, or in our anguished frustration at David Furner continuing as coach of the Raiders.
''But this week's column is not about that but about Heaven, a subject of more than academic interest for this ageing columnist's ageing readers. If there's a chance we're going there quite soon we're understandably interested in what it will be like.
''My friend Professor Richard Dawkins [The Readers: ''Hooray!''] the World's Greatest Atheist has been staying with me in Canberra and we had a discussion about Heaven prompted by a recent essay Heaven Can't Wait: Why rethinking the hereafter could make the world a better place, in Time magazine.''
Jon Meacham's essay was intellectually awful, and after Richard had read it he went out into my Garran street and did an anguished impersonation of Munch's screamer. All along the street curtains twitched.
''I feel despair when I read this kind of rubbish. I want to burn every copy of it!'' the great man seethed after he'd come in.
Tristan, my jet-black, three-legged cat …
The Readers: ''Hooray! We love him. He was fabulous last week.''
The Columnist: ''You readers are turning my column into a pantomime.''.
The Readers: ''Oh no we're not.''
The Columnist: ''Oh yes you are. Anyway, Tristan sensed Richard's angst and leapt into his lap to soothe him.''
''This Time essay,'' Dawkins seethed, ''is about a flurry of new US books about Heaven and one of them, Heaven Is For Real, is about a four-year-old Nebraskan boy called Colton Burpo.
''He fibs that while he was anaesthetised for surgery he visited Heaven and climbed into the lap of Jesus. He met the Virgin Mary who was making a fuss of Jesus just like a ''mom'' would and that he met John the Baptist and talked to him, which must mean John has his head back now after having it lopped off in the New Testament.
''There were halos and bright colours. His true story has been written up by Lynn Vincent, ghost writer of Sarah Palin's memoirs! The book is a bestseller. Polls show that 85 per cent of Americans believe there's a Heaven.
''Perhaps the cause of reason and atheism is lost.''
''Yes, perhaps it is,'' I sighed. ''I don't think much can be done about people's shy hope that we might survive death. I feel it myself. Death is uninviting.''
''But death is only oblivion, little dunderhead,'' Dawkins snapped, with Tristan nodding his head in loyal (but disloyal to me) agreement with our guest.
''When the writer Kurt Vonnegut, an atheist, was asked if he feared death he said 'No, I don't. I've always loved sleep.' Heaven is an invention invented to give people leading wretched lives the illusion that there is, thank goodness, an idyllic eternal life to come.
''But lucky people like you, living an idyllic life as a designated Living ACT treasure and with millions of adoring fans of your idiosyncratic journalism, ought to have no need of such fairy stories.''
''In your convoluted way Richard,'' I replied, trying not to care that Tristan was licking Richard's face now the way he once used to lick mine, ''you put your finger on my greatest worry about Heaven.
''It is that I feel I'm living in a kind of earthly heaven here and now. If there is a heaven it's hard to imagine it being better than today's Canberra and easy to imagine it being worse.
''Canberra gets more heavenly every day. Is there a National Arboretum in Heaven? Is there a Canberra Symphony Orchestra conducted by a Nicholas Milton? Is there blissful self-government in Heaven and, even if there is, does it attract leaders of the calibre of Chief Minister Gallagher? We have 250 bird species in and around Canberra but are there any birds at all in Heaven?''
''No, the only winged things in Heaven are angels,'' the professor chortled.
''It's an awful thought,'' I resumed ''but what if, at a sensitive Canberran's death, moving from Canberra to Heaven feels for him or her like a kind of drastic downgrade.''
''Like moving from Canberra to Queanbeyan?'' Richard wondered, insensitively.
''No no no. More like a move from Canberra to Wagga Wagga?'' I corrected him, moving quickly (but all too late) to try to appease this column's Queanbeyan readers. Sometimes Richard makes me want to scream.
