As a student of this city, its ways, whims, appetites and vices, I took an intense interest in last week's launch, at a grand luncheon in a restaurant beside a grey and brooding Lake Burley Griffin, of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra's concert program for 2013.
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You can tell a lot about a city from its citizens' musical tastes, from what it will and won't listen to a symphony orchestra playing.
And since the CSO prides itself on listening to what its Canberra audiences say they want, the 2013 selections must surely say something about who and what Canberrans are.
And so, grey and brooding myself, like the lake beside me through the window, I brooded over the glossy program.
Meanwhile, away in the far distance (for the working press are always put on the outskirts, the Gungahlins, of these upper-class occasions) specks-in-the-distance dignitaries made speeches.
Alas, from the program, we emerge as a rather conservative, unsophisticated flock, living in a kind of Wagga Wagga.
Lots of the selected works are the sorts of things you'd find on one of those four-CD sets of Classical Greatest Hits For Bogans, for people who don't know much about classical music but who know what they like.
So for example there's not a note of my favourites, Sibelius and Berlioz, or even of that demanding Handel. Mahler is ignored, of course, as he consistently is in the repertoire of the Wagga Wagga Symphony Orchestra.
Old warhorses of the repertoire (or ''the literature'' as CSO maestro Nicholas Milton put it in his speech) move arthritically across 2013's CSO offerings, their tired old hooves rattling on the cobblestones. Of course the saving grace of only playing the people what they know, what they sing in their showers, is that there'll be lots for the audiences in the Llewellyn Hall to whistle and hum along with.
They'll all join in Dvorak's Symphony No 9 From The New World, Smetana's The Moldau, Wagner's inevitable Ride of the Valkyries, Carl Orff's stupendously overrated Carmina Burana, and, as one knew there was bound to be, in Tchaikovsky's daft 1812 Overture. Then there's the song Tony Abbott sings in front of his mirror while doing his bodybuilding, Leonard Bernstein's I Feel Pretty.
Then, also inevitably, (though no one will be able to sing or hum with it for the ghastly thing doesn't contain any music, let alone any tunes) there's the bogan music of Ravel's inexplicably popular Bolero.
And yet, as I divined in another column in another place earlier this week, its popularity is explicable after all because a philosopher has pointed out that its 17 minutes of hydraulic pumpings and grindings remind people, subconsciously, of sexual intercourse.
The program is really rather depressing. It says, rightly or wrongly, that Canberra is Wagga Wagga and that Canberran music-goers won't put their bums on seats for music that's in any way demanding by its nature or by its length.
Everything to be played is undemandingly brief and bite-sized. The fact that Bolero takes only 17 minutes (about as long as an average bout of boomers' gingerly-undertaken sexual intercourse) has always been one of its charms for the bogans who like it.
WE MUST ALL pay attention when focus groups focus. I've just heard Bob Urquhart (self-described as ''Managing Director of Marketing Focus, Australia's foremost consultant, researcher, author and conference keynote speaker on customer service excellence'') tell ABC Radio National that the women in his focus groups say that to them Tony Abbott's walk, his gait, suggests to them ''a monkey, an ape-man, a silver-backed gorilla''.
Loyal readers will know that the Leader of the Opposition's gait, his theatrical, macho, ''Look at me! Have you ever seen anyone so testosterone-packed?'' swagger, is an occasional theme of this column.
It all began for me one day at the Canberra Airport when I saw him cross the wide and empty Arrivals space, looking around all the time to check that he was being looked at. At first I thought it was an actor, or a comedian, only portraying a ridiculous walk.
Now one finds, listening to Bob Urquhart, that this has been a theme with the women in Urquhart's focus groups. The women in his focus groups find Abbott unacceptably blokey, and single out the way he, to them, walks like ''a monkey, an ape-man, a silver-backed gorilla''. They see this as evidence of ''his presence, his image he projects'' as an ultra-macho man. They hate it, and would rather vote for a gorilla than for him.
All this is probably irrational, Urquhart says, and Abbott will probably plead, ''No, that's not me at all.'' But alas for Abbott, Urquhart says, if it's what people actually believe and if for them it's a ''turn-off factor'' then ''the electorate's perception is the political reality'' and Abbott and his party are burdened with it.
Urquhart sounded rather dismissive of the intelligence of his focus group's damsels but I, as usual in touch with my feminine side, share their view that we are our gaits, we are how we walk.
''I am Goliath, champion of the Philistines!'' his walk roars. ''Me Tarzan of the Apes, you [women voters] Jane. Stop the boats! Why don't you go back where you came from?''