Brian Turner: I get the Southern Man label quite a bit

Brian Turner fits neatly into the landscape of his home in the Maniototo. Photo / Richard Robinson

Thick fog here. Both in head and outside, Brian Turner emailed on Monday, from Oturehua in Central Otago.

We arrived the next day and drove past pleasant, sunny but freezing little towns; towering schist outcrops; hoar frost- encrusted pasture, and into the thick fog at Oturehua. The landscape was always changing.

This is the Maniototo, the place sometimes called Brian Turner country. He lives in it, cycles through it, fishes its streams and tramps its valleys.

He got "pissed off" with the cold before we arrived, so he went for a bike ride. He came back with icicles on his shins but was triumphant.

He'd just won another stage in the Tour de France, he announced. He raised his arms in victory in his tiny lounge. He has won the Tour de France, oh, about 20 times.

He is given to flights of fantasy, to bouts of despair, to poetry, to gruff utterances, to spontaneous gestures of generosity.

He said to the photographer in the car, "Crank that heat up there, boy".

He gave me his possum cap with flaps to wear and his scarf. He said, "Do you want a hug? To warm you up".

He held my hand in the car on the way back from the pub. He growled at me for moaning about the cold but later fretted: 'I thought after you'd left that I should have given you my down jacket."

He said, "You would be a bit mad, I imagine". He meant this kindly because "anyone interesting is mad. How do you define mad? It's a mad word: mad".

He doesn't particularly enjoy cheerful people - "they're the glass half-full people, which is certainly an expression guaranteed to piss one off".

In his lounge he has three tiny teddy bears, sitting in a row. "They're on a little train trip. As a joke. To be honest, as they say, I do this because people don't expect me to have something like that. People have preconceived views of people. One shouldn't be unaware of one's own absurdities."

The photographer said, "He's hard to photograph. He keeps changing". I knew what he meant. You had to try to glimpse him through the fog.

He said, "I think people's character is reflected in the world around them, the physical world."

So I made him have a go: What might this landscape say about him? "Well, it's not ornate, not ostentatious. There are subtleties about it, which emerge with familiarity. There's nothing gaudy about it. It's also quite unrelenting, at times."

He was apprehensive about being stereotyped, but he shouldn't have been. You'd have as much luck trying to stereotype the landscape, or to interview it.

He lives in a little red house which he calls his shoebox. When we arrived there was still fog outside. Inside, it was fuggy in the best way: wood-smoke and books and papers. We went back the next morning and he shouted, "Come in. I want to finish this sentence".

He is always in the middle of finishing a sentence, but he wasn't too keen on finishing the ones that involved answers to my questions about him.

He sent me a long email after we left which contained more answers (after a fashion) than I managed to obtain in six hours of talking to him.

He is better at talking about his brothers: Glenn the cricketer; Greg the golfer. Somebody once wrote a story with the line: "Speaking up, even when others would rather they shut up, is something of a Turner family tradition."

He has spoken about feeling "beleaguered" as a family. Glenn was pilloried, and how odd this sounds now, for getting paid to play cricket in England. His brother told me a story about going to the pub with Greg and someone threw a glass of beer. "I said, 'They must have thought you were Glenn'. He said, 'I don't give a f*** who he thinks I am. We're out of here'."

That was a good story. He started telling another, about his own early sporting career as a hockey player. He sabotaged his chances by writing a scathing letter to a newspaper about the selectors and was, rather predictably, never selected again. "Yeah, that was stupid."

He started talking about the politics of Christchurch hockey at the time. Then he said, "This is all very boring", and looked at his watch. I've never known anyone to admit to boring themselves in an interview but it deserves applause. And it proves he can shut up.

There was a reason for coming to see him. His book, Into the Wider World: A Back Country Miscellany is a finalist in the Montana Book Awards. The book is about more than fishing and the outdoors, although it is about that, too. It could be read as a book about mates, but he is more subtle than that would imply.

We both tried, and failed, to categorise it. A good read, even for sheilas, and funny in bits, will do. I said, "congratulations", and he shifted uneasily in his chair. "Mmm. Thank you."

Is he pleased? "Yeah." Was he sure? "Ha, ha. Well, yes, of course. But I'm thinking of my grandmother who always used to ... say, 'Remember, self-praise is no recommendation'. And it doesn't pay to get your hopes up about these sorts of things. I must have been shortlisted for the poetry prize about six times and won it once."

I couldn't help but notice, I say, a volume on the outer shelf on one of his book cases: a poetry collection by one Brian Turner. It has a shiny silver sticker on the cover: The New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, 1992.

He got up, muttering, and hid the book. "You bastard! You're an absolute bugger. I'm absolutely done for."

I'm disinclined to believe the inside of his head was foggy. He seemed pretty sharp to me, for someone who is supposed to be a grumpy old bugger, the laconic Southern Man of myth. This is plain silly, of course. He is a writer.

Still, "I get the Southern Man label quite a bit, which I can play if I want to and sometimes do, just to provide what people ask. Most of my friends are nothing like that. In all sorts of ways I don't fit that description at all."

I had been teasing him about being thought prickly. "I know I've got a reputation for being prickly! Others who have hardly met me will tell me I'm grumpy. Well, occasionally, of course, people have good reason to be grumpy about things."

Including being called grumpy, perhaps? "Yes, of course."

I told him off for harrumphing at the photographer who suggested that he might put his scarf on for a picture, "If you want to". He said, grumbling, "Why don't you just ask me to put my scarf on?"

I said, "Because he's polite, Brian!"

Later, as we were leaving, he made a gracious little speech of apology to the photographer. He said, a bit plaintively, that it was supposed to be funny.

We went to the pub for tea, to meet his mate. I thought this might be because he didn't relish the idea of having tea with strangers. But he really invited him so he could tell the publicist he had rustled up some "eye candy" for me - another of his little jokes.

He had taken mild umbrage at a question about whether he got on better with men. "Blokey? Not my kind of people". At the pub there were four blokes and me. His mates call him BT. The talk was about cycling, the All Blacks.

They spun some yarn about a French bloke whose job is artificially inseminating or "fluffing" kakapo. This is called teasing the sheila. It seemed to me a bit of a blokey evening. We left the pub and BT said, "look at that". We looked up at the stars. He said: "You could put your tongue out and taste them."

He seemed to be in a happy mood. He has suffered from melancholia and ill health. As a child and an adolescent he was nervy. He has considered not going on. "I'm not quite as bloody shaky now." He wrote in that email, "It was touch and go for me ... I'm amazed, and a little proud, actually, not to have folded ..."

Something happened in his life (he didn't tell me what, and fair enough), a near disastrous thing, a decade ago, for which he still flays himself. In what ways, other than his hockey career, might he have sabotaged his life? "Oh, I've fallen over a few times at the wrong time. I don't want to go there."

He has had so many operations he's lost count: hips, ears, prostate, his appallingly misshapen and pongy feet, his knee after his mate's dog crashed into him.

"I could have killed the bastard." When he goes to the hospital, a nurse says, "you again!" I had asked if he'd ever considered pills, to make him happier. "Phew!" he said. "No, we were brought up to guts it out." And, "I've always found the outdoors quells anxiety."

Against the odds of his body, he's a tough bugger. Or he can play at being one. He writes, in Into the Wider World, "it's flannelette pyjamas ... for most of us blokes in the south where the mornings are bracing, often, and we pride ourselves on eschewing too much pampering or, as one rugged mate of mine puts it with a grizzled smile, poofery".

Has he got an electric blanket? "Certainly." Isn't that a bit namby-pamby? "Certainly not." It might even be poofery. "Definitely not!"

He can provide what's asked. I'd read a story about how he turned up at a fancy dinner party at his mate Grahame Sydney's place and said no thanks, he wouldn't have any tea: he'd had an egg and some tinned peas on the road.

I'm sure he did, but the telling is just more playing it up. I asked what his relationship with comfort was, and he said, "Well, let's see. I like warmth, good food, intelligent discourse, sociability". There are herbs and spices in his kitchen.

On the way to the pub, I said, "What sort of food do they do?" This was a townie sort of question. "Rubbish," he said. That was a good try, but the fog had cleared and everyone laughed.