We mention this not to try to help the CSO publicise the two occasions (it doesn't need any publicity because there are no tickets left to sell) but to congratulate Canberrans on being so attuned (pun intended) to fine things. For as we never tire of saying, it is one of the proofs that we are a true city that we have, like Chicago, an excellent and popular symphony orchestra and, in the CBR Brave, a fearless and popular ice hockey team. To be tired of this pulsating national capital metropolis and its varieties is to be tired of life.

Of course the sheer infrequency of a Canberra performance of Beethoven's 9th (which unfolds, using perhaps the most famous tune known to mankind, into a rapturous setting of the Ode To Joy) may be giving it some novelty.

Then, too, these two CSO concerts featuring the 9th also include Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, thus cannily guaranteeing an abundance of bums on seats.

As some may know (for this column attracts the well-read), those who thrill to every note of the 9th in the Llewellyn Hall will be having an experience Beethoven himself never had. By the time of the symphony's first performance (Vienna, 1824) his deafness meant he could hear none of it. Legend and reporting has it that, also unable to hear the rapture with which it was received, the contralto soloist turned him to see how the audience was applauding.

At the Beethoven Haus museum in Bonn there is a cabinet displaying, poignantly, a range of primitive (but strangely elegant as if they could be works of art) hearing trumpets. Desperate, Beethoven resorted to them, but without success.

John Baldessari's Beethoven's Trumpet (With Ear) 1977, was inspired by the sculptor's viewing of the instruments at the Beethoven Haus.

"I was really fascinated with them as sculptural forms, especially one that he had designed himself that I thought was quite beautiful," Baldessari has testified.

Baldessari's creation that you can see from our picture gallery-goers find irresistible (there is music to be heard coming from it) is made from resin, fibreglass, bronze and aluminium.

The fact that the two concerts are all but sold out already will surely mean that lots of Canberrans will be disappointed and desperate. Perhaps, on the two nights, scalpers will lurk in the shadows outside the Llewellyn Hall, rather as they lurk outside the MCG on Grand Final day selling scarce-as-hen's-teeth tickets at breathtaking prices.

Any scalpers will lurk outside the Llewellyn Hall on Wednesday, May 11, and Thursday, May 12, ahead of the concerts that begin at 7.30pm

Mention above of the CBR Brave ice hockey team (this columnist is a doting fan and season ticket holder) enables me to report that for each home game fans (even season-ticket holders) must begin to queue outside up to 90 minutes before puck-drop.

Queuing, so infrequent a phenomenon in Canberra, is on this columnist's mind because of the exciting new phenomenon of the professional queuer.

Professional queueing was discussed last Thursday on ABC Radio National's The Money program.

The program featured a scintillating item about Sydney-based Airtasker, a local service marketplace that enables people who need someone to do something (it can be as simple as finding someone to put together an Ikea item for you) to find someone to pay to do it.

And one task people use Airtasker for is to find someone to queue for them. After all, Airtasker's CEO explained, lots of us can't afford the time away from work or other obligations to stand about in queues, and so are happy to pay someone to do it.

Why would you, if you are a $1000-an-hour orthodontist, queue for the new iphone when you can pay a battling undergraduate or retrenched newspaper reporter $50 to queue for you?

Professional queuers are said to be common in China, where there is so much long, long queuing to be done and so many people doing it. Meanwhile, professional queueing is very well established in some of the world's great cities and professional queuing agencies are springing up everywhere.

Some Canberra ice hockey fans may already be hiring professionals to queue for them. But, alas, Canberra's professional queuers will get little work from me. Perhaps because of my English working-class background, I have always had a fondness, an aptitude, even a genius for queuing.

Traditionally the English are accomplished, virtuoso queuers. In one of Evelyn Waugh's novels there are docile working-class Londoners who go out looking for queues to join, never asking what it is they are queueing for.