Peter King and Cecilia at their Christchurch farm.

New Zealand is nothing if not tech-forward. Early this year, it recorded 6.84 million cellular mobile connections. That’s 130.3 percent of the population (5.124 million people.) But don’t count Peter King among the cellular crowd.

In a way, he is being very Kiwi in his refusal to have a cell phone. “It’s just a personal thing really. I do a lot of research, history, background on land in New Zealand. And I just find the cell phone an impediment,” he says. We’re talking at his small country spread east of Christchurch. He is a property valuer. A small farm owner. A social life lover. A Kiwi male of a certain age who feels the New Zealand of the techno age has lost, well, something.

“If I’m doing the research work and the phone goes off, even if I’ve got it on silent mode, it interrupts my thinking capacity. And then, I’m a social guy. But thanks to cell phones, we’re starting to lose a lot of the banter that we used to have between ourselves. It’s part of our social life. And I feel I don’t want to lose that. Besides, I have a wife and four sons who are more than cellphone-savvy. So why bother?” He bursts out laughing. He’s a man who laughs a lot. His whole face laughs. You’ve gotta laugh with him.

“My wife did buy me a cell phone. In 1988. She said, ‘You need a cell phone.’ And I realized the only reason she wanted me to get a cell phone was so she could then ring me. ‘What are we having for tea tonight?’ I’m being serious! Anyway, this one afternoon, she bought me the cell phone, and we had arranged to meet at a building in central Christchurch. And the phone went. And I couldn’t get the thing working. And I literally threw the cell phone into some bushes. So she finally turned up. And she said to me, ‘I tried to phone you on the phone!’ And I said, ‘Yes, but I couldn’t get the thing to work.’ She knows me. She said, “Where did you throw it?” I said, ‘It’s in those bushes over there.’ So she called the phone again, and the bushes started ringing. She went over and got the phone and she said, ‘I’m not giving it back to you.’ And that was it. I just get by, like we did in the old days. Like, I went to the pub last night, and at the end, I said to the guys, ‘Are we coming next Friday?’ And they all went, ‘Yes.’ That was it! All we needed! No cell!”

The art of conversation? “It has most definitely gone downhill. We’ve lost that [enjoyment of] discussion that we’d have conventionally with people. I go to a gym three times a week. Two thirds of the people in the gym are walking round with their cell phones on their ear. In the gym! But then one of them will burst out into speech. ‘G’day. Yeah. You know that property that we’re trying to sell...’ And I’m like, ‘Can you not, just for one hour, turn it off, do your exercises, and then go back and have the excitement of seeing how many messages you’ve got?’ Like, when I go to ‘the other office’ — okay, the pub — at the end of the week, they say to me ‘Kingi, we can’t stop you talking!’ They’re right! I’ve got lots of things to talk about. Like, ‘Anybody seen a good Western lately?’ Or just what’s happening in the world. I work for myself. So when people say, ‘Why do you go to that shitty little pub?’ I say, ‘It’s so I don’t end up with my head up my arse. Because it’s very easy to become involved with yourself, where you think you’re actually quite good, but you’re not. You’re just one of the regular people. And so I go to the pub, the Craic, partly because it keeps my feet on the ground. It’s a scrappy little Irish bar, but it’s on a bus route. Drinking and driving laws are strict here. Fortunately, the bus stops right there and I can catch it home.”

During the summer, he went to the Philippines with his number two son to dive on four Japanese freighters that had been sunk in World War 2. “We all dive. So the only thing we did was book the air tickets. Everything else was by the seat of our pants. But my son had his cell phone, so all the time he has his apps. ‘Which way are we going?’ ‘Where will we go and stay?’ I said, ‘Let’s just have a look around.’ ‘Yeah, but the app says we should stay there at that place…’ So he’s doing one track and I’m on another track. But it showed me that going by the seat of your pants sometimes was the best way to travel. You actually got to talk to people, you got to find things on your own, and if you got lost, you learned something. We’re adults! No need to be pampered by cell phones!”