And the best surprises come when least expected, when doing something ordinary, like pumping petrol.
It was one of those unmanned petrol stations where the fuel is a few cents cheaper at the cost of having to interact with a screen.
"Hello," I said, because you may as well when pumping petrol.
At worst you are ignored. At best, you reap a breezy and inconsequential chat that makes the chore pass quickly.
"Hi," said the driver. I gestured at his trailer.
"Landscape gardening," he said, "and a bit of building".
He was a lean man in early middle age with a week’s worth of stubble and there was about him an endearing cheerfulness, a grin beneath the surface, a sense that he sensed possibilities.
"How’s business?" I asked.
He said that for a year or so it had been very quiet indeed, with too many tradies chasing too little work. But now, at last, it had started to pick up again.
The landscape gardener looked me up and down.
"What did you do before you retired?" he said.
Ha. Had I not been holding the petrol gun I’d have done a quick double back somersault with splits to demonstrate my youthfulness.
But I just said that I wrote stuff for the newspapers and was still doing so.
He asked me where I stood on Palestine.
I said I didn’t stand anywhere on Palestine.
I hadn’t been there, I didn’t know enough about it, and, if truth be told, I didn’t care enough.
Besides, if those who did know all about it and who cared a lot couldn’t solve the problems there, then nothing I might say was likely to serve any purpose.
"You’d like Noam Chomsky’s take on moral responsibility," he said.
Now, if you’d offered me a bet that morning that I’d find myself being schooled at a petrol station by a landscape gardener on the subject of Noam Chomsky I would have offered you good odds. And I perked up with the surprise of it.
"What take is that?" I said, for I knew less about Noam Chomsky’s moral philosophy than I did about Palestine.
The landscape gardener said that, according to Chomsky, our first and over-riding responsibility was to ourselves and to those in our immediate vicinity. And if each of us only took that one responsibility seriously, then all manner of things would be well.
This seemed to put Chomsky in the same boat as Voltaire, who famously concluded that all that any of us could do was to cultivate our own garden. But I didn’t say as much to the landscape gardener because I didn’t think of it until later.
"Most of the stuff in the paper is none of our business really," he went on.
"‘We don’t need to know it. I remember an interview I once saw with Gore Vidal on the subject of television news."
"Go on," I said. I once started one of Gore Vidal’s books, but I found it very hard going.
"Vidal said that if you sat a hundred people down in front of the six o’clock news then interviewed them at nine o’clock about what they’d seen, they’d know nothing. In other words, the news does not inform. It merely entertains. It titillates. It’s a sort of moral pornography."
My car was full. I slung the petrol gun back in its holster and said I had better be on my way, and it had been very good to meet the landscape gardener, albeit only briefly.
"And thank you for surprising me," I said.
"My pleasure," he said and we shook hands.
And as I drove away down Port Hills Rd I found to my surprise that I was grinning.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
