But does the year have any redeeming qualities?

It is one of the recurring themes of Bob Dylan fandom chirruped in social media and by adoring music critics that this year's release of Rough And Rowdy Ways, his 39th studio-recorded album, rescues this otherwise ghastly year from total worthlessness.

Dylan, 79 now, his music the soundtrack to the lives of so many of us who are now a little gnarled with age, excites that kind of worship in his admirers.

I am one of them and recently took part in a U3A discussion and playing of tracks from the album of compositions of the man who was controversially awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Greatest Hit song (more of a chant, really) of the album is the 19-minute Murder Most Foul (you can hear it on YouTube, and you have a duty to do that).

One analysis of the opaque composition is that Dylan is saying that the conspiratorial "they" assassinated JFK and from that moment the USA lost whatever idealistic golden promise it had; that today's Trump a product of the degenerate US malignancy set in motion on that terrible 1963 Dallas day.

Whatever the song is saying it is a hypnotisingly melancholy and profound thing to listen to.

And yet, my U3A group following the verses/poems the Nobel Laureate has written and set to music, I had the irreverent thought that as poetry the lyrics are quite awful.

In a new piece about the famously dreadful poet William McGonagall (1825-1902) the essayist Matthew Sherrill bestows on McGonagall the title of "the worst famous poet in the English language".

In which case, I heretically muttered under my breath as we discussed Murder Most Foul, Dylan may be the second worst. The atrocities of Murder Most Foul including rhyming "Patsy Cline" with "behind", "all that jazz" with "Birdman of Alcatraz", and saying of the speeding presidential Cadillac "Put your foot in the tank and step on the gas/Try to make it to the triple underpass".

Readers, if you're tragically unfamiliar with McGonagall, treat yourself, online, to his painfully famous masterpiece The Tay Bridge Disaster. Here's a clip from it:

Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,

Your central girders would not have given way,

At least many sensible men do say,

Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,

At least many sensible men confesses,

For the stronger we our houses do build,

The less chance we have of being killed.

Perhaps if McGonagall had been able to sing his bad poems, pleasingly accompanying himself on the guitar, his failings as a poet wouldn't have been so obvious.

As it was, pressing on, with what Sherrill calls, "the impregnable conviction of the talentless", McGonagall made many public performances of his poetry at which, Sherrill reports, he was deservedly pelted with "potatoes, footwear, rotten eggs, fish, sacks of soot, peas, snowballs, and, on at least one occasion, a brick".

The recent wondrous ultra-beautifications of Canberra's inner and surrounding hills with snow has given me a brilliant idea and has reminded me of the Griffins' own dreams of hill-beautifying.

On to my shy brainwave in a moment but first a reminder that Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin had a visionary 'paint the hills' vision for the city they had planned and now dreamed of.

A 2018 ACT Heritage Council essay notes: "The [1913] decision to revegetate [with native flora] the [Canberra] hills was an imaginative response by the Griffins' to the extensive clearing that had denuded the hills around Canberra.

"The initial vision for Canberra's surrounding hills was to be one based on colour. Each hill was to be matched and named with an accompanying colour, so that Rosy Hill (Black Mountain) would be planted with pink and white flowers; Golden Hill (Mt Ainslie) with yellow plants; White Hill (Mt Mugga Mugga) with white flowers and silver foliage, Purple Hill (Mt Pleasant) with purple flora; and Red Hill with red plantings."

We have no room here to report what became of this grand idea (see the indicated Heritage Council paper) but only to gasp at the grandeur of it, of a landscaping vision involving a whole landscape.

And perhaps my own brainwave is, subconsciously, an echo of the Griffins' hill-beautification vision.

Mine is a fancy that would never have even occurred to me before, in recent months, fake crowd noises were introduced to empty football stadiums to give a pleasing illusion of a full house. So there is a place for creative fakery. After all, I am passionately fond of fine theatrical effects when they are used in films and in the staging of opera and ballet. And the ACT is, as Shakespeare declared of all the world, a stage.

And so, Canberra's winter surroundings so beautified by real (but alas infrequent) snow, perhaps we should turn to the mass upholsterings of our high places with cosmetically lovely fake snow.

Perhaps governments could make artistic adaptations of greatly enlarged versions of the already useful 'snow machines' used at winter sports resorts when true snow is scarce. And/or governments could look to making mass sprinklings of something harmlessly white and biodegradable from aircraft.

I offer this brilliant idea just in time for the Canberra Liberals (who seem to have no original policy ideas of their own) to take it into October's election as a popular vote-winner.