I mean, I've certainly had that in my own... career and all sorts of other you know doing joint research writing and that kind of thing um but i want to just take you because we're talking about where you are what you're doing now and that's how i've uh become aware of you and i want to see you at concerts and listen to your cds and things like that but go back to the beginning so i said at the beginning that you you started off as a as a sort of traditional classically trained pianist at the Royal Academy of Music in your early days? Were you thinking then that you would be playing Chopin etudes and Brahms piano concertos for the rest of your life? Or did you always know that you would be branching out in different directions, do you think?

So it's a difficult one.

I always wanted to be a musician and I always wanted to play the piano and I, and I sort of, you know, was fed the idea of being a concert pianist.

And so if you're given this idea, that's the way you, imagine your life going but at the same time I was writing I was composing from really early and I remember I remember a brother of mine saying when I was talking about later about being a concert pianist he said oh that surprised me because I always thought you were going to be a composer so he viewed me within the family as actually on that trajectory of of going you know ending up writing music um so i guess stan i didn't feel this massive conflict occasionally maybe that's probably not true but yeah occasionally i felt the conflict between uh between writing avant-garde, if you like, that I was writing when I was a child in the early 70s and I was even writing late 60s.

And studying Beethoven and Schubert and Bach and Liszt and whatever, occasionally I wasn't quite sure how they fitted together and would I be performing sometimes my own works.

But now when I look back on it, I see that there was a conflict in terms of, did I want to, what's it, lovely phrase by the pianist Keith Tippett, did I want to be, did I want to be, what did he say? Did I want to be an archivist or did I want to be a creator? Something like that.

Did I want to, replicate works that have already been written or write my own and and throughout history in the classical world you've had people who have been who have been sort of uh conflicted by this themselves i mean you know the the the well-known beethoven and schubert specialist arthur schnabel the pianist he he used to admit to writing um you know avant-garde music at home because he liked to do it but he said no one will ever want to play it and he didn't play in his own recitals um nowadays you've got people who are trying to bridge that you've got the very well-known British pianist Stephen half who composes and plays his own stuff.

about music

And just what is the gap between the need and what you have in terms of bus services?

Well, at the moment, we've got five trips a day, weekdays and three at weekends.

And the last trip back from Hamilton weekdays is 6.15, weekends it's three o'clock.

And the last time that people can go back from Raglan is quarter past four or ten past five.

And so people can't really spend the full day here.

So there's all sorts of issues like that.

And we've also got the problem of the commuter buses where people are standing on the bus before it gets to Hamilton.

Is this a longstanding issue or getting worse or both? Have you got population growth happening there?

Welcome.

Thank you very much.

Kia ora.

It's great to hear the reports from the ground in Kaikōura.

It's, uh, been incredibly wet.

As much as three hundred and fifty, three hundred and sixty millimeters of rainfall up over the ranges through there, but even down in the township itself in the last twen- uh, forty-eight hours or so, a hundred and thirty-five millimeters of rain.

So that's a huge amount of rain to come through in a relatively short space of time.

Uh, Hawke's Bay, Hawera and Hawke's Bay, watches for the ranges, yeah?

Where are the areas most affected, and what's the current status?

Those inland parts of Otago, particularly in those higher parts above, above about three hundred meters, have seen the most of the snowfall through the nighttime.

So those higher mountain passes, places like the Crown Range Road as well, been really impacted by the snow.

So well worth keeping a close eye, not just on the forecast, but also on those road conditions from NZTA, uh, TA Wakatahi.

And we have also got a heavy snowfall watch still in place for those southern parts of the Canterbury high country.

Now, most of the snow is gonna be above about four hundred meters, with the heaviest snow above seven hundred meters or so.

So really, those higher mountain passes, but a real wintry feel through there.

Are there any other parts of the country on watch at the moment?

John, do you have thoughts about how you, how you navigate that or how you might navigate it in the future?

Uh, I mean, s- sort of.

[laughs] I feel like one of those things that I've learned is, you know, they'll, they'll kind of come to you with questions, and I'm trying to, you know, make sure that...

I don't wanna put too much on her, um, or, like, you know, muddy the waters for her.

Like, she may end up being completely different from me politically.

I wanna make sure that I am able to embrace that.

Like, I wonder how many parents who are politically active are... [laughs] like, fear that, like, "Oh, my gosh, my...

Hmm