The Readers: Been there.

The Columnist: After which we're going on to Vancouver.

The Readers: Been there, too.

The Columnist: Then on to Colorado in the USA.

The Readers: Best skiing we've ever had.

The Columnist: Yes, that's the point I was getting at in my opening sentence. Australians are so well-travelled now that my excursion to Shanghai and beyond seems unremarkable. World Tourism Organisation statistics just distilled in the Griffith Review show that a third of Australians travelled overseas last year - well over 600,000 of us every month. So it's no wonder, the Griffith Review essayist says, that with all these teeming travellers coming and going, our airports can sometimes be ''such ghastly places''.

Not that our airports teem with little, stay-at-home me. At 66, and excited as I am about the prospect of gambolling to skyscraper-festooned Shanghai, I notice, sighing, how little of the world I've seen and how little time there is left to go and ogle it. For example I've never put a Hush Puppy down on South American soil or on African turf and now probably never will. I've never seen the pyramids along the Nile, and they, wistfully, complain that they have never seen me. Scandinavia too (other than mystic, troll-infested Iceland to which I once made a spiritual pilgrimage and Found Myself) has been beyond my reach and budget.

Another thing people of my vintage notice is that while we may have been somewhere in the distant past it's now so long since we were there, that, really, they can longer be the same city. Aberdeen and Bangkok have surely moved on from the Aberdeenery and Bangkokery I knew, just as someone who hasn't been to Canberra for 30 years cannot really claim to know Canberra at all. We were just a kind of Gympie or Orbost 30 years ago but now are a kind of Vancouver or Boulder, Colorado.

The world is too big and there's not enough time but in any case boomers may anyway notice in themselves a kind of autumn-of-life contentment with home. Last Saturday, while suffering the bitter torture of shopping for trousers at nightmarish DFO (is trouser shopping the worst nightmare for First World men?) I overheard another trouser seeker telling a mate he, the strides seeker, had been overseas 15 times last year, for DFAT.

I ought to have felt a twang of envy at hearing of this globetrotter's globetrottings but didn't, somehow. Lying awake that night, wondering why (for in many things I am Envy's plaything and often turn green) it struck me that one of the joys of life in modern Canberra is that it's a metropolis that now supplies so many of a thinking person's wants. It is a stimulating paddock in which to graze.

Yes, one would quite like to go and see Vladivostok (The Readers: Been there) and Timbuctoo (The Readers, lying now: Been there too) but meanwhile modern Canberra keeps one cheerful and busy.

Now that the Canberra Taliban have been defeated and the city is big and diverse, ever-morphing and bristling with novelties and surprises and changes, hankerings for foreign parts don't seem especially strong. Is this a kind of metrosmugness? Perhaps, but the man who is tired of today's Canberra is tired of life, and 2013 promises to be such a buzzing jamboree that some of us may have to approach our GPs for some chemical assistance in keeping tranquil.

Yes, lying awake and worrying about the loss of one's wanderlust's libido. Sleepless in Garran.

The authoritative Boston Globe has just reported that ''for baby boomers sleep gets harder to come by'' and then has a Harvard Medical School professor explaining that for the boomer-aged ''the body clock changes'' and makes it harder for us to enter the Land of Nod.

And yet, to return to my theme of Canberra's supplying of our wants, there may not be a better city in which to lie awake at night.

In Garran these nights the saving grace of one's insomnia is that one is awake to hear the boobook owls, making an ancient sound that was surely heard centuries before the paleface arrived to transform this continent.

One of the two within earshot of me appears to be a Garran owl nearby in my own Lower Garran frost pocket.

Every night now it is having a dialogue with another just across Hindmarsh Drive and social climbing up in O'Malley. Shanghai, Vancouver, Vladivostok and Timbuctoo nights can have nothing to compare with this divine owlery.