But (blushing) we make an exception today because women of ACTEW Water have just made a big sisterly contribution to the Uplift Project by donating good-quality, new and second-hand bras. The bras will be sent directly to battling women of our nation and region who can't afford to buy bras of their own.

This just-taken (at ACTEW at Mitchell) and blush-making picture (we have had to avert our eyes from it) is of some of the 84 apparently redundant bras (with an estimated value of $1500) ACTEW women found for the project.

Since 2005, the Uplift Project, with assistance from Intimo and Rotary Australia World Community Service, has sent over 1 million bras to wherever women have requested them. Deliveries have been made to Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, Tonga, Solomon Islands, the Philippines, Bali, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, the Northern Territory and the Kimberley region in Australia.

Angie Drake, of ACTEW Water, tells us that many of these deserving women may never previously have owned a bra of their own.

"For many of us here in Canberra, not being able to purchase a bra – for whatever reason – is probably not something we even think about," she said. "Being able to assist women through this program is something that we're really glad we can support as an organisation because we know that it will make a difference."

Doing some online research (for this is not one of this columnist's areas of expertise), it emerges from Glamour.com that Western First World women are certainly in a position to donate some bras. After all, on average, they have 16 of them, "topping up their collection with four purchases each year". In a lifetime of bra-wearing, an average Western woman will spend more than $4000 on them.

But of course rich, vulgar women spend vastly more than this and trend-setting role model for women Britney Spears has in her wardrobe a $US20,000 BodyRock "Eternal Love Bra". It "features a removable 18-carat gold zipper, which comes complete with a skull-shaped gold pull with diamond encrusted eyes". We do not know, because we are too shy to study the photograph closely, if there is an Eternal Love Bra among the ACTEW donations.

In contrast to the First World, Drake says there are places in the world that Uplift Project sends bras to where, if they are available at all, a new bra can cost between 10 and 30 hours' wages.

"ACTEW employees regularly make choices about what sorts of charities they would like to support – this is one cause that certainly resonated with many across the organisation," she said.

Awake, bourgeois Canberrans of the gentle sex! To find how to donate the 15 bras you don't really need to your sisters in need go to upliftbras.org.

Fortune favours the Brave

Youthful Petri Pitkanen, much-adored Finnish goaltender (goalkeeper) for our all-conquering CBR Brave ice hockey team, is bound to play for many teams in many cities during his illustrious career.

But clever, super-literate Canberra will almost certainly be the only one of those cities to celebrate him by incorporating him into folkloric local fiction. For lo and behold the gritty Finn, Canberra Symphony Orchestra maestro Nicholas Milton and our faunal emblem the Gang-gang cockatoo are the ingredients-in-chief in the latest Capital Yarns short story.

Sean Costello's Capital Yarns website, much-praised in this column, invites Canberrans to offer Costello three Canberra-flavoured people or topics for him to then weave into a Canberra-flavoured short story. Costello writes imaginatively and his Pitkanen/Milton/Gang-gang story A Brave Symphony is a zany illustration of his craft.

It should have been posted up for the city to read the morning after the heavily bombarded Pitkanen mightily helped the Brave to beat the Mustangs at Phillip (in the delirium after the final siren, the win putting the Brave in the finals, the Brave boys skated up to Pitkanen to give him manly kisses and hugs).

Your gnarled columnist is a veteran spectator of 1000 great sporting contests in Canberra but, other than Mal Meninga's triumphant farewell home game for the Raiders (August 1994) at the Bruce Stadium, I can't remember a more joyous sporting occasion than last Sunday's at the Phillip rink. Twenty years of sports euphorias!

In a "fairy tale" Hans Christian Andersen wishes he'd written, the city has gone from not having a hockey team at all this season (the Knights withering from poverty) to having a winning one. "We're ridiculously stoked!" captain Mark Rummukainen rejoiced afterwards. We fans were (and remain) ludicrously stoked.

As we never tire of saying, to be metro-credible a real city needs both a fine symphony orchestra and a fine ice hockey side (because it's for excellence and diversity like this that we live in effervescent cities like ours and not at snoozing Broulee or bucolic Wagga-Wagga). Today Canberra is blessed with both.

And there was a poignant and then very 21st-century passage of events at Phillip on Sunday when an injured Mustang player's blood left a dramatic, operatic blotch of crimson gore on the white ice. My companion on the terraces took a photo of it with his phone and sent the image off into the ether and was soon in text correspondence about it with folk not lucky enough to be there with us on this night of nights.

Visit capitalyarns.com.au/yarns