At that moment I was not in Tenby, nor Molleston, nor Pembrokeshire. I was 10,000 miles away from old South Wales and on the shores of New South Wales's Sydney Harbour in the superb Catalina restaurant. It was a glorious Australian Sunday morning a week ago.
Taking my first day out from Côr Meibion De Cymru - the South Wales Male Choir's brilliant tour of Eastern Australia to lunch with my long-time friends Wal and Dorothy Sewell in their native city Sydney, I was waiting to be seated when the restaurateur saw me.
The restaurateur was Tim Hughes. He had, indeed, last seen me in Tenby. 'The T. P. Hughes's' are also long-time - almost lifetime - friends of mine. Mary, Tom, David and I have shared much over more than half a century. I'd known Tim as a teenager, but hadn't expected to meet the celebrated man that he has become at Sydney's most popular restaurant, where he presides.
Being known to Tim was a passport in itself. Already more than half full, the Catalina would be taxed to seat those others crossing the car park and guests were not just arriving by car.
Out on sun-kissed Sunday Rose Bay, small float planes were taxi-ing to and fro. The larger Catalinas used to do that on the Cleddau estuary between Neyland and Pembroke Dock in my teenaged wartime, but these seaplanes brought customers to join us in the Catalina for Sunday lunch.
Known to Tim Hughes, there was no problem with our reservation. Michael, Tim's friend, associate restaurateur and owner of this elegant eatery, came to meet us. He recommended the oysters - "The best I've ever seen" - and made us entirely at our ease, while Tim showed us off to all and sundry. There was little time for more than passing references to 'home' as the luncheon gathered pace.
As if all that were not enough, there was a cabaret. A second lunch was served - "before our very eyes" - as a family of pelicans, the birds whose beaks hold more than their bellies can, arrived, as they daily do at lunchtime, to dine off the cuttings, the fish heads and tails, served to them on the sea-front balcony rail by the apprentice chefs. Magnificent birds they were, but then Australia's like that - extravagant in flesh, fur and feather.
No wonder our Tenby boy has chosen to make this life and living there, but isn't it a delight that, transplanting the energy and the enterprise of the earlier T. P. Hughes and Sons, he has made a fine reputation, too?
GORDON PARRY