For a while there, it rather looked as though April was going to involve a tour of all the cities of New Zealand for a bewildering variety of conferences and meetings. Auckland is now coming to me instead of me going to it, inasmuch as Auckland is represented by the person I would have had to meet there. But I am still scheduled to visit Hamilton and Wellington, and have recently returned from a couple of days in Dunedin, which is probably the best city in the world if you are in the market for a house with a turret on it.
I travelled down with the Museum Detective, who had her own mysterious appointments in the city, at least one of which involved a Colossal Squid. I was sadly unable to join her on this expedition, but I instead had the pleasurable experience of spending the morning chatting with Alan Musgrave about his time as a student of Karl Popper. Alan seemed generally in agreement with the versions of Karl and his wife Hennie I intend to use in my play, which was a relife. Several of his stories involved useful impromptu performances as Karl, which helped a great deal in my understanding of how the great man went about such activities as searching a bookshelf for an unflattering photograph of Heidegger, storming into a Head of Department’s office, and calling Hennie to make robins stop fighting. Although Alan didn’t meet the Poppers until some decades after the point at which I want to set the play, it was immensely valuable to talk with somebody who had actually known them personally. The play is well under way, and I have now written fully a page of it.
My other appointment, to talk about sketch recognition software at Dunedin Polytechnic, turned out to be rather shorter than expected, so I had time to wander around town visit the museum (they have Martin Phillips’ original leather jacket!) and the art gallery, and spend rather too much money on tea and tea-related utensils.