If you think the idea of a gluten-free multi-grain cracker a little far-fetched then think again. There really are such things and Googling reveals that one company making them rejoices in the name Crunchmaster.

It is a wonder sports journalists, who love a good cliche ("crunch time for wrecking ball bundled out under an injury cloud") haven't adopted the word crunchmaster. It could be deployed to describe all those players and teams that ever rise to crunch-time challenges. Canberra's very own Nick Kyrgios showed himself to be a crunchmaster at the 2014 Wimbledon when he survived nine match points to go on and defeat, to out-crunch, Richard Gasquet.

More of Nick our crunchmaster in a moment. Meanwhile, still with our birds, there is the essential ritual these mornings of breaking the ice on our bird baths so that the birds can get at the water to bathe and drink. We have had poignant reports of one bewildered backyard Currawong tapping its beak in vain on what is usually a yielding substance (the bird bath's water).

We have been using this spell of extreme frostiness to point out to Canberrans that it is only because it promised a "bracing" and health-giving climate in winter with many frosts, that this spot beside the Molonglo got into the tournament for the choice of a federal capital site. When you look at the sites that got into the quarter finals (a little Wimbledonspeak there to give this history item immediacy) all of them are bracing/chilly-in-winter contestants. Balmy NSW places were not even allowed to play in the qualifiers.

And on the subject of iciness, and with coldness bracing enough to create some ice thought a virtue in a sight, there was lovely Canberra-site-promoting morning here in the winter of 1906. With the must-be-bracing-in-winter template established, a party of 36 federal parliamentarians and Sydney and Melbourne press descended on Queanbeyan by special trains. On this "picnic" (the word used to do describe these site-seeking excursions) they'd come to look at this raved-about (by its Queanbeyan promoters) Canberra site which most of them had previously never heard about, it being in the wilds of NSW.

For their visit on August 13, 1906, Canberra turned on a meteorologically dazzling winter day of azure skies and bracing, cheek-tinting air. The cause (of Canberra being an ideal site) never looked back after that day. It was the kind of feels-great-to-be-alive winter day Canberrans (unless they are our abundant miserabilists), appreciate today. And on that perfect day there was an auspicious moment.

The man from Melbourne's Argus reported the next day that it had been an "exhilarating drive" from Queanbeyan to the Canberra site for the "the three big coaches" and "a long line of smaller vehicles driven by residents", including the mayor of Queanbeyan "in a light buggy with a natty pair of ponies".

"The coaches trundled away from Queanbeyan railway station, crossing first the shallow Molonglo River and then a streamlet, whose surface cracked in thin sheets as the wheels went through."

The musical crackling of the thin ice of the streamlet (perhaps Woolshed Creek?) was music to the reporter's ears and surely to the ears of the hopeful burghers of Queanbeyan because it testified to just how appropriately bracing this place was.

Alas, for those of you who prefer to believe that the federal capital was built out here, up here, to be out of reach of the guns of the Russian fleet (you also believe in the Loch Ness Monster), there is not a whiff of a fragment of a scintilla of any evidence for that dear old idea. Even I, knowing the complex truth, would prefer to believe the simple.

The Canberra site's case was meteorologically blessed by the perfect weather of August 13, 1906. On previous parliamentary "picnics" some visited sites had been cursed by wretched weather on the day the pollies and press were there. Had the party of August 13, 1906, come here on a winter day as marrow-freezingly Siberian as last Sunday, foggy, and with the ice on the bird baths and streamlets as tough as steel, our hopes might have sunk without trace.

Meanwhile, to escape Canberra winter days like last Sunday, Canberran Nick Kyrgios has gone to sunny London to play lawn tennis at Wimbledon.

With his heady blend of massive talent and on-court testosteroney young male awfulness he is dividing the nation into love him/hate him camps. And so we have invited readers to rise to the challenge of composing Nick Kyrgios limericks. Part of the challenge is finding anything to rhyme with Kyrgios, but reader Maurits Zwankhuizen has found that an easy lob to put away.

Of late all the news is of Kyrgios:/He wins but I cringe when I hear his dross./He's Canberran born and bred/But, should more insults fly, I dread/I might go so far as to cheer his loss.

Reader Judith Pearson, being similarly judgmental, writes:

To Nick Kyrgios:
For tennis, you need strength and guile
to come out on top of the pile,
but if you behave
like a bad-tempered knave,
it won't help your game or your style.