My Dunedin

‘This fucking place never changes’ says one of the two men walking in front of me, down the hill from the Octagon. He doesn’t mean it kindly, but he’s right – Dunedin is always the same, more or less.  I’ve been down there a couple of times before with fringe projects, other times with family, and I was there again the other week. Arrival in Dunedin, for me, is always paired with a decent jolt of nostalgia - the kind that comes with a change of season. The light is shallower and the air is crisper than where I’ve come from. The buildings are the same; solid and old, not really what I think of as New Zealand buildings. The odd thing is that the people don't age. I get older, the students stay 18. I’m not down that often, but often enough, so every time I’m there I feel a kind of adjacency to myself the last time I was there, and also to the times before. I think about how I’ve changed and how I haven’t. On the first fringe  I felt at home at pint night on campus. Now, of course, I’m ancient, but I feel closer to that person than I do when I’m at home. A limited number of things have happened to me here, in a limited number of places, so my memory of them is clearer, and linked to geography – places have defined meanings. There’s where I saw James Bond in 2006, there’s the hospital where my aunt took me when I broke my toe in 2009, there’s the bar where I had a sip of Joel's whiskey in in 2013. Wellington’s a mess of overwritten memories by comparison, impossible to read. Going to Dunedin is a kind of reminder that time’s passing, because for me time has a way of not passing there. 

​Ralph