Christchurch was fine. It was my first visit there since the earthquakes and I freely admit I was frightened.
At seven o'clock on the Saturday morning, I was ripped from a scintillating dream by an aftershock that whanged into the house like a runaway petrol tanker. I would learn later it was a four-point-something, and also that many Christchurch people had barely noticed it. A waterhead had surfaced the previous day predicting the two faultlines were about to merge, so my fear was trembling away with reasonable justification.
I was glad I had brought enough medication for three weeks and not three days in case we were marooned on the hill where we were staying with most of Christchurch reduced to a smouldering siren-garnished rubble beneath us. A numbers man at heart, I was constantly calculating what percentage of the 62 hours we would be in Christchurch had passed, and informing my increasingly disinterested wife of the figure.
"Twenty-one percent gone," I would intone. "Once more and you sleep in the wheelie bin," she would reply.
But yes, Christchurch. I have always struggled with the city, and there certainly isn't room in this column to list the city's palpable defects. That our visit there last week also contained the prospect of death and, worse, most of the decent restaurants being closed, just darkened my grimace as we approached the outskirts of the city.
There was of course the All Blacks-France game on the Saturday night, a game of such moment that I would gleefully have watched it in Kabul. In fact, with my father-in-law sitting beside me staring at the ridiculously small TV, Kabul did seem the better venue. He is the quintessential one-eyed Cantabrian, who watches every sporting event only as it relates to the Canterbury players involved.
So where I was watching an international rugby contest with a fascinating backstory of black despair and refereeing larceny, he saw only selectorial cockups that had left prized Canterbury personnel out of the game. Thomson, he said, was useless. That's Thomson from Otago.
Read from Canterbury, even injured, was better. It was a tragedy Andy Ellis, from Canterbury, was not one of the halfbacks. And how could they have Sonny Bill Williams, from Canterbury, on the bench?
Hore, who lives in Otago, was clearly unfit, he said; you can tell he likes the grog. What are they doing with Corey Flynn?
That's Corey Flynn from Canterbury.
It was like we were watching two different games. Fortunately we both won.
But it wasn't just the All Blacks scoring points that Saturday night. I sat next to my wife with my arm wound around her neck like a comforting scarf, a pose I rarely take watching rugby in Dunedin, possibly because she is usually in a different room. I looked over at her parents on the adjoining sofa. "By hokey, you have produced a magnificent woman here," I purred, as I gave my wife a fawning squeeze, completely indifferent to the alliterative profanities she was hissing into my ear.
"Aren't they wonderful together?" said her mother proudly, an admiring tear forming in her eye. Roy 82: All Other Men On Earth 3.
On the Sunday we went to the Ferrymead Speight's Ale House, owned by Canterbury rugby legend Tane Norton. They had a 600ft screen.
The waitress was lovely and perfect, the sort you almost feel like tipping, except New Zealanders don't tip. I gave her instead a 10 on the Customer Comments report card. That should help her through university.
When we arrived back in Dunedin there was a big red box at the door from a corporate snack-food giant, filled with virtually everything they produce. I could only assume this was because I had mentioned in passing to its managing director some potato chips we had bought for the Rugby World Cup Opening had been soft, stale and bendy, not that I like to complain. We have been eating from the red box ever since, thinking warmly of Christchurch.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
