Jim Mora is so practised at putting people at ease, when you interview him you half expect to hear yourself later on Radio New Zealand National.
Or, better still, arrive home to find the wilderness of the alleged back garden has been tamed and transformed by Television One's Mucking In team.
By the end of the telephone interview, I find I have probably answered more questions than he has.
Still, it is early December.
Just summer and just the time for a relaxed ramble.
He suggests the thought of a treasure trove of southern summertime memories might be lean pickings, although he is quick to recall in his early days in radio at 4XO in the 1970s, sun-bathing on the roof of Radio House, at the corner of Moray Pl and Stuart St, when the temperature was 15degC.
He remembered thinking that was warm, but in Auckland, where he lives now, that would be regarded as a "mite chilly".
He does remember guaranteed hot Februarys in the South, however, and the cadets at Otago Boys High School keeling over on the parade ground in the sweltering temperatures.
Such days seem a long way away in early December when, on the day of our interview, the mercury is expected to struggle to reach double figures.
He is still fond of Dunedin, where he spent about 20 years of his life, taking in secondary school, university and the beginning of his media career.
His first job in the early 1970s was at the Chief Post Office in Princes St, a place he remembered as a "great big intimidating building" and an experience which opened his ears to what went on in the workplace - men telling dirty jokes and swearing like troopers.
His task was to sort the mail for Clutha and Waiwera South, but he "lost that job because of a lack of competence" after a few weeks.
He puts it down to a "kind of mail dyslexia" (or should that be male?).
"In the end they were not that happy with my efficiency in the mail sorting room."
" . . .I remember being slightly chagrined that my genius was not recognised in terms of mail sorting."
A career in the postal service was not what he had dreamed of, however.
His desire was to be a professor of English literature.
"I envisaged myself as a kind and solicitous teacher of admiring students. By 40 I'd be cruising. I'd have tenure in the university and I wouldn't be working very hard. I would be writing amusing and witty books."
Such occupations seemed to get a lot of respect in the media and gave great joy to children the world over.
"That seemed to be the ticket to me".
It was not "that sharp" an ambition, he says.
If he had considered his options more carefully he might have gone for a career in medicine, perhaps choosing opthalmology or treating people's skin ailments - situations where patients would keep coming back.
He has often asked people he has interviewed if they would change anything about their lives if they could be 18 again and a surprising number said they would not.
His professorship plans foundered when he struck Middle English.
"I only scraped through Middle English."
He also found Beowulf, from an earlier period, impenetrable.
Such a career would have meant he would have missed hosting Mucking In, the television programme which began in 2000 and in which he aids and abets communities from around the country to make-over the gardens of much-loved people in their midst who are too often too busy caring for others to have much time for their own back yards.
Nine years on Jim still loves doing the show.
"I know it's a bit of a cliche, but I do meet the best people in New Zealand."
It is "just a magic time for a couple of days", working with cheerful people who loved being able to help.
Despite having an impressive curriculum vitae which includes a variety of roles in radio and television, column writing, writing children's books and the creation of a successful cartoon series Staines Down Drains, with animator Brent Chambers, Jim says he never feels that he has achieved much and is not smug about what he has done, thinking that he could have done more.
"Sometimes I get the feeling that I haven't really started."
He would like to do more cartoons - he feels the need to create something his children could be proud of later on. (They "quite like" the cartoons and books he has completed, he says.)
"It's not like writing The Time Traveller's Wife or War and Peace - it's a little contribution."
He and Brent have completed three cartoon series and are trying to make a couple more.
He had plenty of ideas, but it was a hard business and much more labour-intensive than people might realise, despite changes in technology.
Much of broadcasting work seemed ephemeral and it was the outside of people's lives which were shown.
It was a privilege meeting people, but they were only met in a certain context and for a short time.
He would be interested, he explained, to make a documentary series about the end of people's lives, when all the artifice would be stripped away, leaving whatever wisdom and insight they had.
If someone had proclaimed a philosophy, how did that reconcile at the end of their lives?
It was not a subject usually dealt with in biographies which generally only gave a short passage about the subject's last illness.
He doubted anyone would commission such a show and he accepted approaching possible subjects had the potential to cause offence.
Asked if he is ever likely to consider returning to the South to live, he says it would be difficult unless he changed jobs.
He often thinks of Dunedin, but says wistfully that when he visits now instead of it feeling like "putting on a pair of slippers it now feels like new shoes".
It was inevitable that the city and the university, where he was once editor of Critic, had changed much in the past few decades.
He said he still got excited coming to Dunedin and has visited with his three children, now aged 5 and 7, pointing out all the landmarks and showing them the houses in which he used to live.
The older he got, the more important those formative years in Dunedin seemed.
"Maybe if I got back more often I would still feel I belonged - it would still feel like home. I don't feel I belong as much as I used to. I am slightly sad about that."
". . .I would have to break-in Dunedin if I ever lived there again."
I could have suggested the process might start with the Mucking In team attempting to break-in my 2000sq m paradise (despite my unworthiness) but thought it would be cruel when I arrived home to drink in its fashionable splendour - a transformation from a combination of overgrowth, bare dirt and weeds.
Even a batch of my freshly made scones could not compensate for inflicting such torture.