KENT BLECHYNDEN/Fairfax NZ
Although Damien Wilkins officially took over from Bill Manhire in February, he had already in charge of the International Institure of Modern Letters' legendary MA programme for years.
What the accoster was intimating was that it was impossible to replace Manhire as director of Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters and he felt sorry for Wilkins. Bill Manhire was the creative writing course.
What could Wilkins say, backed up against the frosty glass cabinet of gourmet goods?
At that stage, he hadn't even applied for the job and wasn't sure he wanted it. "People assumed I got it in a shoo-in, a done deal. It wasn't even a done deal in my mind."
But the grocery shopper's perception that Manhire was indispensable to the institute he'd created more than 12 years ago is widespread and, obviously to Wilkins, a myth. "The thing I now say is, Bill Manhire is our brand, like Colonel Sanders. He's not actually cooking the chicken, he's a luminous cloud hovering and people don't care that he's not there.
"I think people recognise part of Bill's achievement was to make it just not about himself in every way."
Manhire - who had run creative writing courses in some form at Victoria since 1975 - had not been integrally involved for several years with the legendary MA programme. It had been Wilkins in charge, and Wilkins now runs the PhD course, currently with more than a dozen students, that Manhire set up in 2008 and was latterly running.
Wilkins did decide to take the job - partly because he would be one step removed from the intense, draining immersion in MA students' interactions and fledgling books, out of the formal set-up of a classroom and in the more autonomous atmosphere of those completing PhDs.
"And one of the reasons to apply for the job was that I wanted to look after the place. Having someone in from outside seemed odd. We have a strong ethos but continuity around that is quite important.
"Apart from that, getting out of teaching several days a week, every week, was quite appealing after eight or nine years being involved with students and about 10 books a year. Something has to give and usually that's your own imaginative space." A few months after he took over from Manhire in February this year, a new book has emerged from Wilkins' reinvigorated imaginative space and will be launched next month.
Max Gate is Wilkins' seventh novel and evinces the almost bizarre world of legendary novelist and poet Thomas Hardy as, in 1928, the 87-year-old lies dying upstairs in his Dorset house, Max Gate. Soon his heart will be chopped out, put in a tin and buried with Emma, his first wife, and the remainder of him cremated and interred in Westminster Abbey, "where his friends thought he should be". "Most of the unlikely stuff in the book comes from real life. A dog kind of ruled the household. Hardy and Florence [the second wife] loved it and used to turn the radio on for the children's hour for him to listen to.
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