Regardless, he continues to keep tabs on the "red and blacks", Whaka rugby club (he's a former player), and with Whaka man, Kelly Haimona, playing "over the [French] border" for Italy he remains Whaka-centric.
"He's my relation, I'm very proud of him, his koro Bunty had a great influence on me, clipped me around the ear when I needed it, taught me how to grow up, face up, to stop being a wally."
For a lot of years Duff was a "wally". Is he still?
Maybe he's not as agro as he once was, but talking with him's comparable to straying off Whaka's signposted pathways. An outburst of geothermal proportions rumbles close to the surface; wander into dangerous territory and we're conscious an eruption's likely.
He claims to have walked out of two interviews before granting Our People an audience.
Could this be his abrasive ego talking? "Abrasive," he snorts, "this is the Alan Duff who cooked his niece's kids their breakfast this morning, that's the Alan Duff I know ... I hate egotists."
The Duff we meet drinks herbal tea and claims not to be "tech savvy" when we remark there's a heap about him on Wikipedia. "I've never read it, it's probably a lot of crap."
We say it records him as a child runaway, recounts his expulsion from Boys' High, becoming a state ward, a borstal boy at 15, all facts he's written openly about in his memoir Out of the Mist and Steam.
That (or was it the herbal tea?) clams him sufficiently to talk of the run of episodes that became first-hand fodder for his acclaimed books Once Were Warriors, One Night Out Stealing, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?
Duff puts the record straight about his expulsion - it was for insolence.
"He [headmaster Ted Hamill] took me back in return for six canes; he really got into me, I stood up after four, it was hurting like hell but I knew I had to wear the others, my shorts were soaked in blood; am I bitter? No, that's the way it was."
Of his double runaway act he's adamant he wasn't running from his Pakeha Forestry Research Institute scientist father he loved deeply.
"It was from my internal troubles, when you're young you shouldn't have internal troubles, you know sweet Fanny."
His alcoholic Maori mother deserted her family when he was 10.
Talk of his court-ordered admission to Hamilton Boys' Home at 13 has him reflecting on his book State Ward.
"You could call it getting revenge on my childhood, I wrote that in my 40s when you realise you had things about you that were different."
Time with his anthropologist uncle, Roger Duff in Christchurch, failed to straighten him out.
"Back in Rotorua I was determined to go to borstal, a sentence with a term of naught to two years. How could they be that stupid? How could anyone serve naught days?"
Duff spurns Our People's offer to take him to a district court sitting to gauge if anything's changed since his delinquent days.
"That's the last thing I'd do - be tricked into putting the boot into my home town." Duff's terseness is back.
He is, however, prepared to give credit where credit's due. It was, he says, Waikeria Borstal that gave him his love of books.
"I was in solitary for defending myself against another toughie, I thought this is going to drive me nuts then they took us to the library, I took out the fattest book there, I'll never forget it was a Taylor Caudwell novel, it's what set me up as a writer."
Writing's entrenched in his genes. His paternal grandfather, journalist Oliver Duff, edited The New Zealand Listener, receiving an OBE for literature and journalism.
Duff has an MBE for his services to literature. For him it's hugely ironic ... "that I, a former guest of one of her Majesty's prisons, should be described on my award certificate as 'Her Majesty's trusty and beloved servant'."
Duff launched his Books in Homes programme in 1993, spurred by discovering how little children read.
"I visited a school in Hastings, thought why have they invited an author when it's obvious they don't have any books in their homes? I said I'd be back with books."
The scheme's been replicated in Australia and, more recently, the US.
"What the media doesn't know is that we've given away 13 million books, that's two thirds of the books in New Zealand libraries, not bad for a bad boy from Rotorua, but papers don't write about it because it's positive."
That information's Duff's parting shot, well not quite. He gives us one of the most all-embracing hugs we've ever had.
Could it be that below all that bluff and buster lurks Mr Marshmallow?
ALAN DUFF
• Born: Rotorua, 1950
• Education: Glenholme Primary, Rotorua Intermediate and Boys' High, Hamilton Boys' High (while state ward), Christchurch Boys' High (post borstal)
• Family: Kiwi wife in Bayonne France; "lots of children."
• Iwi affiliations: Ngati Rangitihi, Tuhourangi
•Interests: Literature, "black music, anything by black artists", rugby, boxing
•On living in France: "There 65 million people love literature, here 4 million watch reality tv."
•Personal philosophy: "Love."
