And sure enough, venturing out of my Canberra comfort zone to spend last weekend in lawless Sydney I witnessed a grisly horror there that left screaming schoolchildren spattered with blood.

But wait! Readers, I’m only having a lend of you! It was only fake theatrical blood and it got spurted at schoolchildren (on an outing from sheltered Bathurst) gathered right in front of the stage at the Pop-up Globe theatre in Sydney’s Moore Park.

We were all at a pantomimic performance of Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. During the play there is a play presented (yes, a play within a play, one of The Bard’s favourite ploys) by a comically awful troupe of amateur actors. Their laughably ridiculous play features two melodramatic suicides by stabbing and in this production fake gore (totally washable) went flying out from the stabbed actors and into the schoolchildren, spectacularly spattering the white shirts of their school uniforms.

How the children screamed, with mingled horror and delight.

Back to the bloody, gory, Moore Park Globe in a moment.

First, though, I reflect that this was my first gambol to Sydney since reading in the Fairfaxian press earlier this month Elizabeth Farrelly’s typically stimulating and reader-stirring feature ‘Congestion is a cuddle': Why I welcome Sydney traffic.

Farrelly knows Sydney and Canberra very well and this piece (available online, all thinking Canberans should give themselves the treat of reading it) compares and contrasts the two cities. In part it is Farrelly’s refreshing, teasing celebration of Sydney’s notoriously teeming traffic. That traffic congestion (real and imagined) is notorious among Canberrans who one finds discussing Sydney’s traffic in the horrified tones with which one might discuss a Sydney infested with Black Death or verminous with Velociraptors, and to be avoided at all costs. So it was exciting to have her sing the praises of the discreet beauty of something, Sydney’s teeming traffic, that Canberrans find horrifying.

And as, last weekend, our Canberra to Sydney charabanc bustled in to traffic-teeming Sydney, adding to that teemingness, my thoughts turned to Farrelly’s essay.

“The frictions and irritations of city life are, in a way, their point,” she diagnoses.

“Sydney is a great city not despite its congestion but because of it. This is why all those liveability lists that pretend cities are part of some giant suburban comfy-competition are so wrong. Cities are not about easy. Cities are about exciting.

“Canberra doesn’t do congestion … But is congestion such a bad thing? Most people, including most politicians, presume it’s a disaster. But there’s a reason why Sydney has a population of five million and Canberra of 400,000. It’s called desire. [And] congestion is proximity. Congestion is buzz. It is energy and vitality. Sydney may be an ants’ nest, but our social yearnings make us far more ant-like than we care to think. And Sydney is where we all want to be - not despite the congestion. Because of it.

“Congestion is in fact a sign of good city health, a sign that people want to be there … Congestion is a city’s bright eyes and bushy tail.”

Your columnist, a diligent student of Canberra’s qualities and of its flaws and warts, has thought and written similar sentiments many times, albeit without Farrelly’s well-qualified authority. How I love the ants’ nest qualities of big cities, how my inner ant often mopes in Canberra’s underpopulated emptiness, sometimes in my drives across a city which seems, with its absence of traffic and people, like a metropolis from which everyone has fled because of a hurricane warning or from which everyone has been abducted by aliens. But how grand and zesty and ants’ nesty Sydney seemed on this, our Globe-going weekend there! How my inner ant rejoiced at being there among the millions, in Sydney, that scintillating superorganism.

As I never tire of saying, echoing Aristotle, the unexamined life is not worth living. Perhaps Canberrans choosing to live in a city so lacking in buzz might ask themselves why, denying their inner ant, they are not living instead in a throbbing ants’ nest, in Sydney, say, or in Melbourne. The Canberran who never, visiting buzzing Sydney or Melbourne, asks himself or herself “What in God’s name am I doing living in Canberra when I could be living here? Am I not good enough, not energetic enough, not bold enough, not life-loving enough, not excitement-seeking enough to live in a big city like this one?” may be living that unexamined life that is not worth living.

Meanwhile, out at Sydney’s Globe, reached by an omnibus cheerfully chugging along buzzingly congested roads, it warmed my heart to see schoolchildren having an unforgettably happy first experience of Shakespeare. It will have set them up for a lifetime of pricking up their ears (or, if we are all really ants, their antennae) whenever they hear a magic mention of the great poet/playwright’s name.

Happy, fortunate them, for the Shakespeareless life, like the unexamined life, is not worth living.