Canberra's weather is, to misquote an idiom, neither fish nor foul.
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As someone who has endured bone-chilling winters both in the foothills of Mt Wellington - windy enough to blow the milk out of your tea - and British Columbia, complaints about the ACT's sub-zero mornings seem as lame as a pre-Tom Gleeson Logies night.
It may be just the way the human brain is wired but any whinge about the weather here always triggers a Monty Python skit synapse in which the four Yorkshiremen attempt to out-skite each other about their childhood deprivation.
Winter? This isn't a winter.
Canberra's climate is betwixt and between, and therein lies the problem.
It doesn't get cold enough nor wet enough to generate enough snow to turn the nearby Tinderrys into a rival for Perisher, nor hot enough for long enough to warrant low-floating Kathleen, the Sydney tunnel boring machine, down to drill a big hole right under the Clyde and allow the sea breeze to blow through.
If it was genuinely cold, opportunity would knock like Mjolnir on Canberra's Viking portal.
As Lake BG froze over, the good folk of Kingston Shores would sharpen their skates for the daily city commute, fans could watch the Brave train under lights from Springbank Island, and city rangers could show our bemused northern cousins how we ice-fish for the wily carp.
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The ACT building code neither demands a hip roof to shade our windows for summer (which would thankfully suck the walls in from the boundaries of the common Gungahlin bungalow), nor mandates triple glazing to fully seal out the creeping chill.
As a result, we only feel reasonably comfortable in spring and autumn and whinge when at the furthermost extremes.
Really cold is when your Volvo has an inbuilt heater to stop the radiator from being a giant Zooper Dooper overnight and after too much acquavit, people stumble and trip over the power cords strewn across the footpath (I blame the poor streetlights).
It's when a Range Rover's heated leather steering wheel, which in the warmth of a summer purchase appears to be an option of almost Causescuesque excessiveness but in the depths of winter makes your frozen mitts squeak with joy.
It's when heating elements embedded in the Saab's side glass create a worm-like mist creep and when the bloke at the garage asks your wife if she needs a replacement stud or two, he's talking about tyres.
The Finns know how to do cold well, bless them. Here's to a country where steamy silage is a thing of farming joy yet smells like a country tradies' long drop, and to where determined mums who take their tots out in four-wheel drive strollers carry a thermos of warm water for pain-free snot removal (the child, not the mother).
Unlike the Finns, we can't quite justify dressing for a genuine winter extreme.
It might be cold enough for a beanie and scarf, but not a frostbite-preventing balaclava.
Canberrans wearing balaclavas are either the grim-faced heavily-armed specialists behind the dark-tinted glass of the police LandCruisers heading in a determined manner to where some nastiness is occurring, or one of those committing the nastiness (and you wouldn't want to be the latter when the former turn up).
Chunky soled Sorels might be appropriate footwear for drinking in the Thredbo T-bar but not for the Treasury building and if we had genuine winter precipitation here, Canberra's puffy predilection for the down-filled jacket would become like a soggy ciggie in no time.
It would be quite nice to ritualise winter the way other genuinely cold countries do, too.
The winter tyres would be stacked in the garage ready for the first time your father feels the family car's rear end ice-dance and says "hang on, son, this could get nasty!", shovel selection becomes seasonal (explanatory note: the lightweight, ultra-wide mouth type we don't see here are designed for rapid snow removal), and the retired bloke up the road test-starts his obnoxiously noisy snowblower ready to do foothpath-clearing good deeds for the neighbourhood.
Very few Aussie kids would know the joy of slinging your laced skates and hockey stick over your shoulder for the walk to school, looking forward to a quick scratch game on the way home on the local park's frozen lake. The smart kids always took their gloves too and enjoyed whacking the frozen fingers of those who didn't.
Homes in properly cold places have commonsense basements where the underfloor heating unit and hot water boilers are installed first, and the house appropriately built on top. The basement is where the washing is hung out, red wine maintains a consistent temperature and the narrow stairwell has a U-bend to prevent too much junk accumulation.
These homes have proper entryways with sturdy waterproof flooring, boot space aplenty and industrial coat hooks capable of serious heavy lifting.
So if you think it's chilly out there, harden up; in some countries it's only regarded as cold when your nose hairs freeze.