“I was born. The place was Dunedin, and it’s been suggested that if all the people who were born in Dunedin were suddenly to go back there wouldn’t be standing room in Carisbrook.” Denis Glover Hot Water Sailor 1912 – 1962 , 1962.

In the morning I note that a bible has jumped to it’s death out of one of the adjoining room’s window. Perhaps it has died so that I may live. For I am most certainly alive.

I set out in search of breakfast. Dunedin is a city that makes stuff. Or at least it always has been. Wilsons Whisky, Cadbury Chocolate, Greggs Coffee, Speights and Emerson Beer , Cowells Pavlova the list goes on. I walk past the gapping space that was once the chocolate factory. It’s soon to be a hospital. Then there will be a gapping space where the hospital is. And so it goes. I don’t hold on to yester year like Michael Obrien does but having grown up in the heady smells of bacon, ham and sausages smoking in  Berhampore’s Goulds Small Goods Factory and of the warm delicious yeastiness of bread baking at the Tip Top Bakery in Newtown I have a soft spot for places that make stuff. Their passing with production moved to Fiji , or Sydney or Wiri is always sad to me.

Anyway it does seem that for every factory that closes 10 funky eateries open in Dunedin so I guess that is a silver lining . I wish we could have both but I don’t make the rules and that is probably for the best. I end up at one of my regular brunch haunts. Morning Magpie. A breakfast bowl is ordered. Initially I am told they don’t have tofu, I say just replace it with bacon. They are disapproving of my seamless shift from vego to omnivore. They find some tofu. It’s extremely good.

A large shar pei dog called John excitedly greets every customer to the premise more attentively than any maître d’ would. He sits next to me as I drink my coffee and intermittently runs to the front door to dispense his welcoming committee responsibilities with great diligence. I try to rub his head but my impertinence results in a firm rebuff.

I meet Mel at the café. The day is glorious. My goal today is to visit some of the small new breweries in town but it’s too early for breweries. Mel drives me out to Portobello . We try to enter the pub. There are people inside drinking. The doors are all locked. We go to a café up the road a little. We drink tea and talk politics and I eat a cheese roll . It’s not judged to be great but it also ends up being the best of the trip. I met Mel on twitter. She lives on the outskirts of Port Calmers with her two kids. We have overlapping views on how the world is. We converse with ease. We have ‘chatted’ on the internet many times but this is the first time we have met in the flesh.
Things are crumbling to the right in the nation. The local body elections have just seen a bunch of reactionary candidates gain power around the country. Wellington is bucking the trend. “Wellington always lags the rest of the country” says Mel. I’m not sure. It seems to me invariably Wellington walks in a different direction altogether.
Mel is the daughter of a minor NZ TV personality from 20 years ago. I have a little bit of insight into this. Back up north where I live in Kapiti there lives a man who fronted a consumer affairs show from when I was 3 years old till when I was 30. Jake his son has worked for us at times through the years between bouts of O.E. When I went to London Jake’s arms were one of the embraces to lock around me and squeeze me tight a world away from home. My insight extends to knowing that they often navigate a series of decisions as to whether to give over the nugget of filial trivia or not. And knowing that people will be surprised and sometimes even thrilled by association even though it is New Zealand, and we all know someone who knows someone. That is how the country works.   

We pick up Bob, formerly the main man at Emersons, and head north to Arc Brewing at Evansdale. Bob is an affable and charismatic people person. This is not always the case with chartered accountants. He is a decade and then some older than me, a family man and always good for a chat. I am aware that I have just brought together two very different people for this mini road trip. The social responsibility for cohesion is mine.
Arc is out on its own in the countryside. The sun is shining and the place is heaving. Jono the brewer recognises me. He is clearly stoked I made it out. I’m glad I did. I’m not a rockstar, but I am known in the beer industry . Perhaps notorious even. I would like to think it’s for my dry wit but invariably it’s probably for being a grumpy stick in the mud. The beers are great. It’s awesome to see the place humming. We eat wild boar nachos and do our best to avoid sun burn.

Mel drives us back into town and Bob and I head to Noisy Brewing. The beer is good. The taproom comfortable and full of families. Bob and I talk mortality. Middle age and the loss of a parent seems to bring out these topics of conversation in me.  Sometimes beer lubricates the big issues. I talk of a friend of mine who in her mid 30’s went to sleep and never woke up. Some weakness in the lining of her inner systems gave way and she slipped from the world without knowing it. Gone too young but without the pain of slow decline. Weighing up the pros and cons of the paths that various lives take is inherently human and yet for the most part the weighing is theoretical. Few of us get to make a choice about how our lives end and those that do we tend to see as tragedy. Bob talks of family members gone too soon. His eyes well up with tears. We have stumbled into a real moment. This line of conversation isn’t cosmetic or peripheral , we have hit a vein. We move on.

We wander over to Steamer Basin. It’s the beginning of a renaissance in a lane in the warehouse district. More businesses are following the brewery into it’s shady confines. It reminds me of the original Twisted Hop brewery in Poplar Lane in Christchurch at the beginning before mother nature in the form of an earthquake wiped it from the earth. History repeats, and over and over.
A man finishes his pint and gathers up two of the most well behaved beautiful whippets. He tucks a dog blanket up and stows it in his backpack. The dogs trot out of the pub at his side obediently. I mis Rubes for a moment. She wouldn’t trot obediently though she would charge as if into battle, with a look in her eye that screamed “Geronimo!”, hungry for whatever experiences were to come.  
The lane way Steamer Basin is situated in is covered in street art. The lane has odd spaces, nooks and crannies which are more about what was left between the various surrounding warehouses as they were built than about any logic as a laneway. This space was originally incidental, negative space, quickly forgotten and soon it will be more important than the street front.  

Bob heads home. I walk to my hotel through the old stone warehouse district. The buildings all display the names of great empires of commerce that have almost passed from living memory, Rattray and Sons Tiger Tea Section, Tapley Swift Shipping Co, Spencer Dudley General Stores , and of course The Union Steamship Co.  
My path then takes me across Queens Gardens past the memorial to the First World War. “To the Glorious Dead” reads the inscription. I shower in my hotel room then head to Al Bar. Al Bar is one of my favourite pubs in the country. I usually christen my Dunedin trips by heading straight from the hotel to it’s door and ordering a pint of handpulled ale and a malt of the month. Arriving so hung over yesterday has put me a day behind. I sit with my Emerson’s London Porter and glass of whisky. Al Bar has what I call snob screens but really they are just booths. To one side an enthusiastic conversation is going in French. The other way some chaps , I’m going to hazard a guess at University folk, are discussing the socio-political implications of The Sex Pistols playing Manchester, Elvis and The Ramones. I appreciate their earnestness. I suspect they are my people.

I wander down George St. I pass a bright neon sign for a business called “Slick Willys”. An open doorway to a stairwell sits beneath it. I think to myself that “Slick Willys” is one of the best brothel names I have ever heard. Afterwards I google it and see it’s a clothing store.

It’s time to eat. I head for a Nepalese restaurant but they are mopping the floor. I take the Taiwanese joint next door. 3 generations of an Asian family are eating there so I take it as a sign of quality.
A young pasty white couple order bao buns and a large bowl of fries. They look disconsolately at each other as they eat their polystyrene esque buns and stuff hot chips in their mouths. I order a stir fried pork mince dish on rice and a bowl of beef shin and noodles braised in spicy broth. Both dishes are very fine.
The three generations have ordered an elaborate succession of dishes, some in steamers and others swimming in broth. They don’t order French fries.
The guy running front of house is Pacifican , he is keen to talk about my tattoos . We talk about how the designs are from my head, not in any Pacific Island tradition but there is definitely some influence. We talk of my tattoists. We talk of how well my oldest ones have held up. I say they have held up better than the rest of my body has since 2001. I get the laugh. I leave on the punchline.