And the conversation at our table turned inevitably to life.
"I'll tell you what's good about Dunedin," said one.
"We've still got our old phone boxes."
I didn't actually think we did have our old phone boxes, but I looked out the window, and bugger me, there were three of them right there.
In the Exchange.
Three lovely old red wooden telephone boxes.
Then I found three more in the Octagon.
That's six times as many as Christchurch, who emerged from The Great Phone Box War of 1988, where the Wizard fought to keep them red, with just one, which is now in Worcester Bvd.
A year after the Wizard forced Telecom to go back to red from blue, Telecom replaced all the wooden boxes with blue plastic ones.
Ironic.
Dunedin now has those same doorless light blue plastic ones.
Clark Kent could not zip on his Superman suit inside one of these see-through shelters; he would instead be arrested for obscene exposure.
"I was changing into Superman!" he would wail to Judge Macdonald.
"But you were still Clark Kent, and people could see your bottom," Judge Macdonald would reply.
We need old wooden phone boxes for Superman.
We don't need to see the process; we do need him to solve the crimes.
The disappearance of the red wooden telephone box was as gradual as it was inevitable.
Television and movies taught us from a very early age to rip the phone from its cord, to tear tufts of pages out of the telephone book when angrily looking for a number, and legions of socially dysfunctional youth proceeded to act out these rituals every Friday and Saturday night.
It became a miracle to find a box with a phone directory intact, or even a phone box that worked.
Indestructible heartless replacements were the only cure.
Another at the table remembered Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner divining a phone number by listening to the dialling clicks.
You could do lots with those dialling mechanisms.
A kid in our primary school class taught me to ring for free by subtracting each digit of the phone number from 10, and tapping out those numbers.
Our home number 86787 became a very simple tapping exercise, 24323.
I felt sorry for those kids stranded miles from home after spending their bus fare money on ice-cream trying to tap out 79898 to be rescued.
It took a skilled and very even tap to pull this trick off; one had to perform like a precisioned machine.
But I was the master of 24323.
Very few things I ever did at primary school excited similar admiration.
For me, the old red wooden telephone box was nearly a life-defining fork in the road.
Phone-tapping was very light criminal activity really, but before too long, I was sneaking on to buses free and stealing Lifesavers, the only edible thing in the shop, from Boardman's Stationery in Kaikorai Valley Rd.
It was when I moved up to Roslyn and got amongst the good stuff at the Roslyn Milk Bar that the real fork loomed, owner Mr Russell storming through the door - he must have had a peep hole - and asking me if there was any reason at all why he shouldn't walk me across the road to the police station.
Of course there were nearly 400,000 damn good reasons why I shouldn't be walked across the road to the police station, but I meekly replied no sir, sorry sir, I will never do it again, sir.
And I didn't.
So, not a formative, and destructive, influence in my life, instead just a lovely memory.
I'm glad we've still got six of them in Dunedin.
Change into Superman there for your next fancy dress party by all means, but don't try phone tapping or listening for clicks: they're digital.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
