We exchanged an email or two and that was that.
Then this week, and out of that enlivening colour the blue, he emailed to say he would be in Lyttelton and would I like a drink? I asked whether the Pope was of a religious disposition.
He had a pinot noir from New Zealand. I had a shiraz from Australia. The other man’s grape is always sweeter.
"My main job," he said, "is looking after a water pipe."
"A water pipe?"
"It’s 500km long."
"Tell me about it," I said, and that noise you just heard was Roger Vellacott clapping.
The wisest man I’ve known, Roger employed me for several years to teach at his summer language school. That in itself is evidence of wisdom, of course, but there was more.
Roger took a generous interest in other people and he taught me that everyone is an expert of some sort, even if they don’t believe it.
And their expertise, regardless of its nature, is always interesting, always worth listening to.
Roger died too young, but were he still alive he’d be delighted to hear that I spent half an hour in a Lyttelton pub learning about water pipes in general and one water pipe in particular.
In the winter of 1893, Patrick Hannan dismounted near what is now Kalgoorlie in Western Australia because his horse had lost a shoe. And he found gold.
Within a decade Kalgoorlie was a town of several thousand, but the climate was harsh and there was little fresh water.
To slake the town’s thirst, an imaginative Irish engineer proposed building a water pipe from Perth some 500km away.
The critics scoffed. The scheme was absurdly ambitious, doomed to fail for engineering reasons and unlikely to be finished before the gold ran out at Kalgoorlie.
Moreover, the cost would exceed the entire annual federal budget of Australia and it would require more steel than any project anywhere in the world at that time.
And yet the government of the day went ahead.
The critics did not relent. Indeed they were so hostile that the imaginative Irish engineer killed himself when the job was still only half complete.
His offsider took over, the pipe was built and 120 years later it still waters Kalgoorlie. And my drinking pal looks after it for a living.
It runs alongside the main highway and when it springs a leak, the public let him know.
The water is under pressure and a pinhole in the steel will send a plume arching over the road. If the leak occurs at a joint between sections it produces a fan effect that is apparently beautiful.
The original engineer invented a system of joining the pipes that did not use rivets.
Rivet heads inside pipes create friction and reduce the rate of flow. Even so it still takes from five to 11 days for any given molecule of water to travel from Perth to Kalgoorlie.
Water travels most efficiently at about 80% of pipe capacity. This is because if the pipe is filled completely the gain in water volume is outweighed by the loss of velocity due to friction with the walls.
Also, although the pipe, like most pipes, is circular in section, the most efficient shape for a water pipe is actually oval.
This has something to do with shifting the sediments that might otherwise gather in the bottom of the pipe, though I didn’t quite understand why.
Most of the water that travels along the pipe is naturally sourced, but increasingly Perth gets its water from the sea.
They have already built one vast desalinating plant and another is coming. Desalination is so efficient, the fresh water that emerges is purer than any natural spring water.
Indeed it is so pure that impurities have to be added to it. Otherwise, in its virgin state, it reacts chemically with the lining of water pipes and corrodes them.
Did I need to know all that? Perhaps not.
Am I pleased to have learned all that? Yes I am.
Do I owe a lot to Roger? Yes I do. R.I.P.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
