And this year we have chosen as well our unCanberran of the Year. The latter gong goeth to a person or persons who have somehow contradicted the spirit of our optimistic, effervescent, brainy little city.

Katy Gallagher was a strong candidate for Canberran of the Year. The Gallagher ACT has felt like an oasis of left-liberal decency in the bleak Kalahari of the nastiness of Abbott-governed Australia.

In these times when, watching and listening to the news, one braces oneself for the ugliness and crassness of what interviewed politicians are about to say, one has never had to to do that with Gallagher. Always straight and sincere, she has never given any of us any reason to cringe and flinch.

Alas, though, she has always been helped in this by never seeming to believe passionately, evangelically, in anything in particular. It must be easy to be serene and inoffensive when no great causes are animating you. Some of us, in our naivety, still half expect a Labor chief minister to be a bit pink and progressive and to have a heart that bleeds openly on occasions.

Other candidates for our virtual gong have included Petri Pitkanen, Finnish goalie of the CBR Brave ice hockey team. Can a Finn be a Canberran of the Year? Yes of course he can - his battling flair gave joy to thousands of working-class Canberrans. But in this case he has been pipped at the post anyway by a local.

It was tempting to give the award again to choirmaster and counter-tenor Tobias Cole. At his ever-progressive initiative Canberra even staged a Handel opera, Alexander Balus, never performed before in Australia. This exemplified our city's audacity and cleverness.

But Tobias can't win every year and this year's Gang-gang Canberran of the Year is Sean Costello, inventor of and author of the Capital Yarns blog and of, just in time for Christmas, the exquisitely illustrated book of the blog. Costello came up with the Big Idea of inviting people to give him three Canberra-based items for him to somehow weave into a short work of fiction. He gets our gong for his grand idea, for his conviction - often lacking in Canberrans - that Canberra life is rich with things worth writing about, and for writing his short Canberra stories so delightfully, so limpidly, so readably. Go to capitalyarns.com.au.

Now, as the metropolis trembles, for our unCanberran of the Year award.

Perhaps, subconsciously, the inspiration for this award comes from the famous annual "award" - big slap, really - for novelists' excruciatingly bad writing about sex.

There has been a teeming 2014 field for unCanberran of the Year.

A hard-to-deny candidate has been the cohort of about a dozen of the conservative, Heritage-Listed Great Bores of the ACT that dominate this newspaper's Letters page. Whingeing, nay-saying, sometimes God-bothering and always bean-counting (how they have feasted, this year, on the imagined 'We'll all be rooned' costs of the visionary light rail proposals), they are unrepresentative of the cheerful, youthful, dashing, innovation-embracing city that most of us live in.

The Great Bores were unCanberran but for our 2014 unCanberran of the Year medal were trounced by the Liberal opposition in the ACT Legislative Assembly.

It wins for its ludicrous, but somehow tragic, carry-on over the Fringe Festival event involving striptease burlesque, in which someone impersonated Hitler. Liberal leader Jeremy Hanson, his excitable MLA lieutenant Giulia Jones and other Liberals worked themselves into a third-rate frenzy over this.

The imbroglio was so very unCanberran because ours has become exactly the kind of city that can have a Fringe Festival without its fringeiness shocking any grown-ups. This is also a city, made up of famously well-educated folk, that knows in its bones that the depiction of someone in a burlesque is not a championing of him or her. Indeed, in the colourful words of the festival's otherwise colourless director Jorian Gardner, the burlesque made Hitler "look like an arse".

Hanson and Jones and Liberal others carried on as shockable yokels might on the local council of some hillbilly town that never has Fringe Festivals but only rodeos. A more vulgar columnist might say, echoing Gardner, that by being so embarrassingly unCanberran the Liberal MLAs made Canberra and its Assembly look like an arse.

BUT OF COURSE this sort of thing only bothers you when you love your city. But when you do

On Sunday afternoon and waiting to pay tennis at Old Parliament House - and fuming, because I am a punctuality freak and my playing partner was three minutes and several seconds late - I was soothed by an only-in-Canberra entertainment.

A family of four magpies arrived at the exciting, restlessly splishy-splashy Centenary of Women's Suffrage Commemorative Fountain in the House of Reps gardens and began bathing in it.

The combination of the gaiety of the sophisticated fountain and of the fun being had in it by the magpies erased my punctuality-affronted grumpiness.

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.