Mouth of the Leith

Early morning run in Dunedin. Cloudy and threatening rain throughout the time I was out. Went to parts of Dunedin I had not frequented those many years ago as a student. I did pass the Cadbury factory where I worked the night shift for three months. I stopped opposite the Dunedin Railway Station, and took a photo which is in the extras for today. I arrived at the Dunedin Railway Station in late February of a year which now seems a life time ago. I was a naive country boy (despite having spent the last six months of the preceding year in Hamilton, after my mother had convinced my father that he needed to leave the hard labour as a farm hand, having had to sell out his own farm some five or six years before).

I knew nothing about universities other than that I need to go there is I wanted to be a doctor. I remain ever grateful for the fates that took me there that year, and took S and her friends there and brought us to the same table in the student union after an appallingly sexist talk from a male professor during the Orientation Week. A connection was made, and has never since been broken.

Normally, I don't dwell on these things, but being in Dunedin and moving in areas that are so familiar an filled with memories, I am more conscious just now of those times.


From the station I went back to the path beside The Water of the Leith, the small river which runs through north central Dunedin (the Edinburgh of the South) to empty into the Otago Harbour. I took this photo at the point where going further would have been difficult.

Completed the accreditation visit of the Southern DHB, and am now waiting for my flight back to Auckland.