Yes, it was painful to hear Tony Abbott's eve-of-Christmas gushings about Scott Morrison while announcing the ice-cube-hearted Morrison's chilling promotion to Minister for Social Security. But when you play N + 7 with what our prime minister said it really does ease the pain.

What's that? You don't know how to play N+7? In a moment your columnist will recommend and explain it.

But first to Christmas evening's utterly Christmassy, utterly Canberran Christmas eve recital of Christmas carols clanged by the belfry of the National Carillon. A discreetly sprinkled audience of Canberrans was at the shores of the Central Basin for this recital timed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the tragically fleeting 1914 Christmas Eve truce in Belgium when enemies in the trenches sang carols and then played football and shared cigarettes with one another. We parked ourselves on the brink of the National Gallery's Sculpture Garden, under the enormous, iron wings of Antony Gormley's Angel of the North sculpture.

The recital coincided with twilight and one became aware, as never before, what a bird sanctuary the sculpture garden is. To the music of the breeze in the garden's casuarinas was added the trilling and tweeting of battalions of birds. In the tree above us twitching, lean-looking parent Honeyeaters were busily feeding a plump and stubby fledgling.

The setting sun illuminated the eerie beauty of both the carillon and of the $700 million ASIO headquarters.

Senior Carillonist Astrid Bowler clanged, tinkled, trilled and pealed through a program of carols and Christmas songs. The strange instrument the carillon itself, and then the way the breeze raised and lowered the carillon's volume (stiff gusts whisked the sound away), did interesting things to the many familiar tunes, making them at first puzzlingly unfamiliar, as if they'd been turned into jazz versions. My carol-literate companion and I (the same wind that was playing in the casuarinas making her attractive earrings, little green Christmas trees, bobble in the breeze) had a little competition to be the first to recognise a familiar tune the carillon had made mysterious.

Slow to recognise it, once I had I was quick to join in We Three Kings Of Orient Are, singing the version we urchins used to sing at school:

"We three kings of Orient are,/One in a taxi,/One in a car./One on a scooter/Blowing his hooter,/Following yonder star."

Using N+7 you can do amusing things to the words of Christmas carols, to the words of everything, and so we press ahead to explain to you this long-awaited Christmas holiday alternative to Scrabble.

N+7 is a cerebral game invented by a member of the elite and quirky Oulipo (it is no use asking to join the Oulipo because a stated interest in joining it automatically disqualifies you from ever being a member). You take a passage of English (it can be as obscure or as famous as you wish, and so for example there's lots of blasphemous fun to be had with the Bible) and, using any dictionary at hand, replace every noun in the passage with the seventh (or quite close to the seventh) noun after it in the dictionary. Eerily wonderful things can emerge.

Here, first, is what the media reported the PM as gushing at the aforementioned occasion.

"The Minister for Social Security [is] responsible for crafting the holistic families package which will be such an important part of our political and economic agenda. He is the master of difficult policy as he has abundantly demonstrated in stopping the boats over the last 15 months. He is also an extremely decent human being."

Here is what Abbott says (and surely it is what he really meant, subconsciously?) when you play some N+7 with it using the the Macquarie Australian Encyclopedic Dictionary.

"The Minister for Social Security [is] responsible for crafting the hollandaise sauce and family planning pack ice which will be such an important part of our political prisoner and economy class agglomeration. I can think of no finer aerobot than Scott Morrison. He is the master of difficult political correctness as he has abundantly demonstrated in stopping the boatraces over the last 15 Monty Pythons. He is also an extremely decent humanoid."

One reason why some of us never tire of N+7 is that it can sometimes sound like a magically more truthful more explicit version of what is being given the N+7 treatment. Each of the last 15 months of the Abbott government really has seemed like a sustained episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Then, in his famous hard-heartedness Scott Morrison really does strike some of us as more of a humanoid than a human.

Then, when you use N+7 to peer behind what the Prime Minister really meant when he threatened "I'm going to shirt front Mr Putin. You bet I am," you find him threatening "I'm going to shish-kebab Mr Putin."

There are risks (especially the incurring of God's exceeding great wrath) in applying N+7 and the same same dictionary to the King James' Bible's very first words of Genesis. But when you take that risk you replace "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" with the equally plausible-sounding improvement "In the beginning God created the heavy-lifting and the ear trumpet."