Surely, some seethe, the Vikings were vile pagan plunderers and pillagers?

Some wits have suggested (without acknowledging the idea is my intellectual property, suggested by me a decade ago) that our rugby league team might be better called the Canberra Bluebells, an embrace of the ACT's dainty floral emblem.

As it happens I am deeply interested in the Vikings and, sometimes trespassing in Scandinavia, have been to some ripper Viking-celebrating museums.

At Oslo's wondrous Viking Ship Museum (it displays three Viking-era burial ships, one of them, the Oseberg ship built around the year 800, mighty, oaken, elegant and wondrously intact) I almost swooned with joy.

As it happens the Raiders/Vikings dilemma is a minor illustration of a commonplace cancel culture issue. It is that almost everything and everyone the cancellers so zealously want to cancel is much more complex than their tiny, furious minds can comprehend.

So for example, even when one wants to condemn the Vikings for their raidings and pillagings, the fair mind will notice, too, the cultured Vikings' grand achievements in their approximately 300 years of effervescence, in voyaging and exploration, navigation, boat design and boatbuilding, the arts and trading.

Alas, it is the emphasis on their raidings, celebrated in our football team's name, that causes one discomfort. If instead our team was, with its Vikingy themes, the Canberra Boatbuilders and the club made a big thing of images of the beautiful Oseberg ship instead of brute pillager, that would not offend. But alas, once you have seen Evariste Luminais' famous painting of raiding Vikings lugging away (for concubinage and other fates worse than death) a kidnapped young woman plainly kidnapped for her Anglo-Saxon loveliness, it is hard for a thinking fan to be totally at ease with the name Raiders.

But there is one actual (slight but evocative) connection between the Vikings and Canberra the city.

Some years ago, researching my critically acclaimed history (soon to be made into a major motion picture, a musical, starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman) of why and how Canberra was chosen as the site for the federal capital city, I found one or two flattering references to the Vikings during federal parliament's many debates about where the nation's federal capital city should be built.

It was decided, early, that wherever the city was to arise it had to be a place with a "bracing" winter climate because history showed that "bracing" climates brought out the best in our species, in physical and intellectual dynamism. By contrast lazy people of steamy climes, history showed, were never galvanised into thought and deed.

In that context various peoples, including the dynamic Vikings but especially the intellectually effervescent and inventive Scots, were said (parliamentarians all agreed) to illustrate the virtues of "bracing" habitats. Canberra, as my researches showed, qualified for its place in the Battle of the Sites (every site in the tournament was somewhere far inland, elevated and bracingly bleak in winter) by being attractively, stimulatingly, Scottishly, Scandinavianly chilly. That's our city's shy, slight Viking connection.

For my part I really would prefer to have the city's rugby league team named after something less north European and more Canberran.

For instance calling the team the Canberra Fog would acknowledge something unique about our city's meteorological charisma. Ours is easily the foggiest city in the Commonwealth and fog is a mystically beautiful and city-beautifying thing and an inspiration to the best of songwriters and poets.

And there is a footie precedent. We have been mystifyingly slow to embrace our city's fog (of course fog is not an easy thing to embrace) but similarly foggy San Francisco has its San Francisco Fog Rugby Football Club, founded in 2000.

It bewilders, one might even say befogs, that no one has previousIy come up with this obvious suggestion.

What strange, Rolls-Royce powered powerful emotions were stirred on one's Canberran bosom (especially when one's bosom is a wizened, experienced thing, 74 years old) by last week's wonderful goodbye Canberra fly-by of the last, retiring, Qantas Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet.

We were playing tennis at my spiritual home (Reid Tennis Club) when, low in skies of forget-me-not blue, the dear old contraption materialised above us, softly roaring-growling-purring with the voice of an avuncular Sabre-toothed tiger.

The heritage contraption seemed (thank you Mr Joyce) to be including our heritage facility in its farewell peregrinations.

All of us playing (and until that moment there was intense doubles underway on the court beside us while my singles opponent and I had been earnestly playing for a sheep station the size of Belgium) paused, reverently, forgetting tennis and looking up.

How is one to explain this depth of feeling for Jumbo Jets, after all only machines?

I suppose it is that for those of us of a certain age the Jumbos were our major (often our first) transports of delight to the wider world. What faraway places with strange-sounding names they took us to! What momentous occasions they took us across the world to - weddings, funerals, reunitings with families and lovers.

International travel, with its often emotion-packed arrivals and departures, its raptures of welcomes and its wrenchings of farewells, makes a big impact on us and for so many of us the Jumbo Jets, bless them, were elephantine presences (elephants in the room, if you like) in our lives at these memorable times.