KEY POINTS:
On Monday night Anton Oliver will be on the telly on his Intrepid Journey so he's supposed to be promoting it. He loved Nepal and loved the people but he didn't much love the process.
Well, anyone could have foretold that, I'd have thought.
It is, anyway, surely a bit of a swiz to get him to go roughing it. He is for one thing; a big, strong rugby player and there's something in him, I think, which is not at all averse to a degree of discomfort. Still, why did he do it?
He has an uneasy relationship with his public image. One of the first things he tells me is about a response to the autobiography, Inside, that he wrote with Brian Turner. Someone told him that, "they really liked the book and they felt they knew a lot more about me but in the end still didn't really know much about me at all".
He was "chuffed" by that. But now here he is, about to expose himself to some degree or other on a TV show, the making of which he found horribly contrived. He thought "they were just going to follow me and film anything that I found interesting".
Instead it was: "Okay Anton, let's get you coming in from this angle and how about you talk to the mum first," and so on.
"And I just thought, 'this is bullshit. I don't want to do this'."
In the end he had a talk with the crew, who he stresses were wonderful, and "aligned some of my values with what was required for the show".
I sit through this in stunned silence because nobody who goes on telly says these things. They just say "oh, it was all lovely; I loved every minute". But Oliver - how he likes to over-analyse things - thinks I'm being tricky.
"What you're doing now is a professional technique called the pause and you're trying to make me fill in the pause. And when people fill in the pause that's when they say stuff they don't want to say."
I'm pleased he thinks I could be that clever, but, honestly. Could anybody actually stop him saying stuff ? That would be the real challenge.
"Mmm, that's something I'm having to think about when coming to a life after rugby."
He doesn't know what he'll do after rugby. He might be offered a lucrative overseas rugby gig but he's said he doesn't really want to play rugby any more; that his heart isn't in it.
"That just spewed out. I don't control everything I say. Well, it's not often you know what you're going to say before you say it."
He had gone to a lot of trouble organising our visit to Dunedin. This involves going to see where, and how, he lives. And going to see the yellow-eyed penguins - he is patron of the trust - on the coast. Then dinner at a pub.
I wanted to see the penguins and where he lives and I always like tea in a pub. But I was a bit nervous about it all. I knew it would involve hours and hours together (about five hours in the end) and switching to interviewer and interviewee can be a fraught transition. The bugger knew it too.
"She's gone all formal now," he says, when we finally sit down for the interview. This amuses him greatly. I don't mind though because he is very funny when he's amused.
I had feared he might be a bit, oh, miserable, and terribly earnest. He seems to like to do things the hard way but that's because "I've not known many instances in my life where the easier way's actually been the right way".
But he's a happy person, he says. "I don't think I'm introverted. I think I'm introspective. I like to think about things."
He likes to talk too, but he is the best possible person to go and look at penguins with because he just shows you where to look and lets you look in silence.
He is very good, easy company and he loves a good wrangle. I say he's argumentative and he says I am, so we got on just fine.
He made me walk up hundreds of steps and then hills.
"Oh, it was calculated," he says, when I accuse him of it.
"But not for endurance purposes. I figure if you're coming here and doing a piece on me, no one else has really come into my room. And this is how I live; this is the kind of stuff I do. If you're going to write a more interesting and insightful piece on me, then you've got to have more material." This makes me feel a bit nervous because now I have to, I suppose, attempt to write something interesting and insightful about him.
Luckily he is always interesting. Even in those boring, after-match interviews there's the chance he could produce one of his big words like "opprobrium". Which he uses today. I say: "Why do you use those big words? Are you showing off?"
"No, I'm not!" he says, not at all offended.
Is he trying to prove something? "This is where you're going," he says with glee, "this is great! No. I've got nothing to prove.
"I'm not a very bright person. But words are your tools. They describe different thoughts and if you've only got five words - and this could be a really good theoretical discussion - does that limit how you think?"
He does like a digression and this is obviously catching because I wanted to start with his room.
Those many steps were to get to his one large open space which is bedroom, living room and little kitchen. It is the top floor of a former synagogue and above an art gallery.
He is very interested in art and has some lovely things, including two wonderful works by John Walsh which are blues and greys and a bit misty and spooky.
He says he cleaned up because we were coming; he doesn't usually make his bed but he is very good on his recycling and even washes out the cans.
He keeps his telly covered with a cloth because he hates the way it looks, and his books on the floor - not in piles but in a sort of long spill which horrified me.
He's never lived, or even flatted with a woman (except his mother, obviously, who he adores). I say I could tell this - because of the books.
"There's nothing wrong with books on the floor," he says. "The books on the floor are happy there."
He says his lifestyle isn't conducive to relationships but would he actually like living with someone?
"Oh, well, I'm not excluding it, but I'm not going to live with any old one."
He likes to do things properly "and the courtship would take a while".
I try to get him to tell me what he thinks his room says about him, which makes him laugh a lot. "I'm not doing your work for you. That's like me trying to self-analyse. Do some work. Come up with some critical thought!
"Oh, all right then. I would probably say, and this is all you're going to get, someone whose got a broad range of interests; who is interested in lots of stuff."
What I think is that he's made a superior kind of man/hermit's cave; a sort of refuge from all those years of bunking up with other rugby players.
After reading his book I wondered whether rugby had ever made him happy and he says, "No. No it hasn't. It's been bloody interesting though!"
I also wondered why he'd kept at it and he says, "because I keep failing and I don't want to fail."
He means he's had poor form, been dropped, been injured. You can't call getting injured a failure, I say. Honestly, why doesn't he just get a hair shirt and wear it to bed every night?
"That's an interesting question because at one stage I was going through this stuff and I was incredibly unhappy and I got a friend who was doing his PhD in sports psychology and I said, 'Look, I'm not going to make it through the season'."
His friend asked him a simple question: "Why do you play rugby?"
Oliver says he knew what he was supposed to say: "That I loved the game; that I found it enjoyable, that I loved the camaraderie.
"I knew exactly what the answer was but I just didn't have the courage to say it. In the end I did because it was the only thing I could say: Because I'm contracted."
All Blacks are not supposed to admit to such things. Nor are they supposed to say they fear the prospect of being 80 and looking back and having "what ifs. I couldn't stand that."
What he has achieved, I say, is supposed to represent the pinnacle of achievement; of New Zealandness and manhood. "You're an All Black."
"You're talking about media marketing bullshit."
But that's how many people regard it.
"Well, I'm not living other people's lives for them."
He was interested, although not overly anxious about what I might make of him.
I said I didn't know yet; that I'd decide as I was writing, which happened to be true.
I still don't quite know. But what I think I think about him is that he's in search of something and that he doesn't know what it is yet. (And I don't mean a girlfriend, though that too, perhaps.)
But it is, at a guess, something both simple and very hard: trying to be a good person and trying to learn things.
That makes him sound terribly earnest but he doesn't take himself too seriously, truly.
When I say, sarcastically, "of course, you're a pretty uncomplicated sort of person", he grins and gives an "ooga, ooga" worthy of any self-respecting rugby head.
He's only 31. He'll be all right.
Once he gets those books off the floor.
