The Australian federal capital city that I live in sometimes appals me but then sometimes delights.

After appalling me for quite some time I suddenly found it delighting me when, last Sunday, I attended an outdoor performance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

There one was, waiting for the show to begin in a swish little creekside amphitheatre at the Australian National University.

The breeze whispered in the picturesque willows beside the creek and the creek itself, normally nondescript Sullivans Creek, suddenly looked like a charismatic stretch of a Venetian canal.

The packed crowd was Aussie-ly engaging, informal and jaunty.

The warm-up music yodelled through the loudspeakers was catchy and toe-tapping and one of the numbers, Billy Joel's pulsatingly cheerful Uptown Girl, enabled me to engage in a little euphoric singalong karaoke.

The immediate promise (what bliss!) of some live Shakespeare induced a kind of cultural tingling in one's toes and (although this may be peculiar to me) in one's prostate.

And suddenly one was aware of being besieged by a vaguely familiar emotion. It took me a little to identify it, it had been absent for so long. But then I remembered what it was.

"It's joy!" I exclaimed.

"What is?" my companion wondered.

I mused to her that in recent times life has felt so hellish (to the everyday hell of having an awful prime minister and federal government and a loathsome zombie in the White House has been added the momentous horror of the fires) that perhaps we have been gloomier, unhappier than we realised.

But as my spirits picked up, there with the woman I love, beside engagingly Venetian Sullivans Creek and with the Shakespearean magic of the Bard's most magic-packed play about to unfold, it seemed to me that feelings of joy, corked up for months, had suddenly been uncorked with a loud, champagne-y "Pop!"

Some of this delight, I diagnosed later, was delight in Canberra. This city sometimes depresses and very often irritates but then a lot of the time delights.

I'm not an agent for Lakespeare & Co, plucky, pioneering stagers of outdoor Shakespeare in Canberra, and I have no nieces and nephews among the company's players. So when I rejoice in the company's existence it's because a Shakespeare company is something a true city has to have. Other things a true city has to have are a symphony orchestra and national league rugby league and ice hockey teams, and Canberra is blessed with those. And now, with Lakespeare & Co our city edges even closer to true, mature, broad-shouldered citydom.

In a pause in Sunday's performance one of the company's movers and shakers addressed us giving heartfelt thanks to the company's handful of sponsors who include, frugally but admirably, the ACT government.

When and if candidates in the looming ACT elections knock on my door (Liberals no longer do this, knowing that I have installed a sophisticated Liberals-detecting alarm system that triggers a Liberals-repelling pepper spray) or slither up to me in public places to plead for my vote the one promise I will require of them is that if elected they will shower Lakespeare & Co with superabundant funding. A city needs Shakespeare.

So does a nation. If swept to federal power tomorrow, I will cancel the daft plans to build us new submarines and spend the $50 billion instead on promotion of Shakespeare in our public schools (but perhaps not in our obscenely plush snob private schools like undeserving and disgraced St Kevin's) and throughout our now alarmingly unpoetic and dumbed-down land. What doth it profit a nation if it is armed to the teeth but loses its own soul?

Mention of the arts brings me to mention of the shocking news of how movers have accidentally dropped, smashing it irreparably, the unique, handmade grand piano of pianist Angela Hewitt.

Hewitt (for this columnist a goddess) is perhaps the greatest living interpreter of J.S. Bach's wondrous works for keyboard. The lost instrument was dear to her.

"[Hewitt's late piano] was a beauty," The Washington Post mourns, "with a black finish so shimmering that you could see the strings and hammers reflected in the raised cover.

"A hulking instrument, handmade in Italy, it was outfitted with a rare fourth pedal invented by the piano maker, Paolo Fazioli..."

I mention this so as to marvel at how and why the death by smashing of a fine piano seems so very, very tragic. How? Why? I own up to being at least as distressed by it as I am distressed by some of the recent news of some catastrophes that have befallen blameless humans.

What does it say about us, those of us with sometimes stronger feelings for the imagined sufferings of an inanimate object, a piano, than for the sufferings of members of our own species?

I took these agonisings to my wise old therapist Mystic Bridget.

Her diagnosis is that for passionate music lovers a working piano never ever seems like an inanimate machine but is a living thing. When it is not being played it is only asleep, and, if you put your ear to it, can be heard melodiously snoring.

Hewitt's grief, vividly reported now, sounds as real as if she had lost a significant flesh-and-blood other. How strange fine music is! How supernatural its part in our lives.