Bosham Church, Sussex

Lunch in Old Bosham today at the Anchor Bleu pub with George, our youngest son after picking him up in Southsea. The newly-opened Hindhead Tunnel has cut journey times to Portsmouth by some margin.

Bosham can provide plenty of entertainment if you catch it on the right day as people often park their cars by the water side without realising they will be caught by the tide. Ice Cream Dave, who has a regular pitch there, likes to photograph the results and has loaded a compilation on to You Tube for the enjoyment of all. He also videos dogs who like his ice cream.

The car drivers who come to grief here are, unwittingly perhaps, honouring a royal precedence for it is in Bosham (or somewhere nearby) that King Canute is said to have attempted to exercise his divine powers by commanding the sea to retreat (as is pointed out below it was actually an exercise in humility). Sadly there was no Saxon equivalent of Ice Cream Dave to record the event.

But a Saxon equivalent - in the form of English seamstresses - was on hand to record Bosham Church (pictured above) in the Bayeux Tapestry, an account of events surrounding the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Harold Godwinson set sail from Bosham to Normandy - a trip that enable the future King William to claim that Harold had pledged the English crown to him.

We dropped George off after spending a while in the South Downs during the afternoon plundering the blackthorn, collecting enough sloes to make a bottle of sloe gin.