Fascinating Iceland (that nation's population of 350,000 eerily similar to the population of our dearly beloved ACT) is enjoying some worldwide limelight because its soccer team has been doing wondrously well at Euro 2016.
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Quite apart from the fact of soccer being the world game and Euro 2016 attracting a global TV audience of billions, everyone everywhere who loves an underdog (Australians lead in this) is besotted with Iceland's performance. That so tiny a nation with so small a constituency of soccer ball-kicking males can do so well on the sport's world stage (this week Iceland will play England, with its soccer-crazed population of 53 million) has Iceland wriggling into international affections everywhere.
Those of us with blood ties to England (this columnist grew up there, but has just had his semi-English heart broken by Brexit) and with a special fondness for Iceland will watch Tuesday's match with what the tabloids like to call "tug of love" sensations.
For once upon a time, when newspapers were plump and profitable, The Canberra Times paid for me to visit Iceland. The visit left the most lasting of impressions. The experience is quite tattooed on the mind, as indelible in its way as the tattoos some of today's Iceland soccer team have on their Viking-burly bodies.
In return for sending me to Iceland the Times did expect me to write about it and I did my best while finding it a wrestle to find the proper words to describe it.
Culturally it was a joy to write about. Iceland was different.
I was reliably informed by someone I interviewed that there was not a single female in an Icelandic prison.
A scholarly-sounding Icelander told me with a straight face that some Icelanders blamed trolls for mishaps at accident black spots.
Reykjavik's main landmark, the starkly white Hallgrimskirkja church, has a steeple that makes the church look like a sacred rocket about to hurtle off into space and up, up, up to Heaven. Somehow, with Hallgrimskirkja looking so poised and prepared for take off, one was surprised to find it still there on its launch pad the following morning. But Google's up-to-date snaps confirm it is still there to this very day.
And in Reykjavik one was reminded of the population's tininess by the way in which in the tiny parliament the tiny press gallery space above the teensy chamber seemed to have room for only two journalists, perhaps for Iceland's Michelle Grattan and Paul Kelly.
But description of the island's looks and feel was a struggle. Sometimes words won't wield a matter. To call Iceland "scenic" is not good enough because some of its landscapes, so sculpted by ice and volcanism, are more hair-raising and worrying than pretty.
Is there anywhere where landscapes in their forbidding bigness can give one such a strong sense of being a trespassing, insignificant teeny-weeny maggot of perishable flesh, with a maggot's trifling lifespan? Today, looking back on my sojourn there, I remember the sensation of being outdoors in Iceland being like the buzz one might get from a beautifully-made horror film, a hard-to-describe mix of fear and delight.
Readers will have heard of Dark Tourism involving the strange psychological buzzes given by travel to places historically associated with death and tragedy. But Iceland would be a good destination for a kind of Intimidation Tourism, a kind of Pull Your Head In Tourism, where people would go to have Nature remind them of their unimportance in the great scheme of things. Narcissists, deluded that everything is about them, could go to Iceland in the reasonable expectation of miracle cures.
Some places are so dramatic that they surely shape the people who live there. Canberrans may not be shaped by living here on the Limestone Plains (although our city is a bit of a man-made pimple in an immense landscape) but Icelanders are bound to be who they are because of where they live. But quite how this truth expresses itself in the Icelandic character is for historians and for this column's old friends the ethnomusicologists to describe.
Meanwhile, while on the world game, the beautiful game, methinks Canberra's Men's Premier League matches every winter weekend may be Canberra's best kept sporting and social secret.
The standard of the eight-team league is wonderfully high and there is an intimacy about the venues (every unkind thing bellowed at a ref by a coach is amusingly audible on the bracing, Icelandic air) that is lost in giant stadiums.
Pitch quality varies quaintly. There is bucolic Kambah 2, home of working-class Tuggeranong United, where it often seems as if cattle may graze there midweek. Then there are the Grass Fields of the AIS (home of those toffs, the Centre of Excellence team of prodigies) where generous federal fundings have the pitches always immaculate and Wimbledon-looking.
The AIS venue is also the very best of the venues (although all are quite good) for bird-watching during lulls in play.
At the last match there a wedge-tailed eagle drifted high above the pitch and the biggest family of white-winged choughs I have ever counted (there were 22, eerily echoing the number of players on the field) fossicked together under the trees behind one end.
Play is always Viking-ruthless and passionate (as if there are sheep stations at stake), and, especially at the matches of Canberra FC and of Canberra Olympic there are sweet reminders of what a multicultural city we are as fans natter to one another in the languages of homelands far away.
