We arrive to blistering blue and talk over open books as the tide pulls out. At first, only the small cars try the wet road beneath the sea. Then the minutes pass and with them come the vans and the SUVs, nudging carefully around the boulders. The water shrinks beneath the hulls, lingers lower at the ankles of the paddle-boarders. In the morning, the first thing I open the curtains to are the clouds of catmint in the neighbouring garden. It takes me a while to clock that the water has gone, leaving tufts of green behind and a path that people use to cross the harbour.

It has been a long time since I’ve felt the peripheries of something in this way. It reminds me of Lindisfarne, at the other end of the country. There were vanishing roads to navigate there, too. Bigger signs, a more dramatic sense of time passing and standing still at the same time. I spoke to someone recently who saw the ghosts of Roman soldiers passing by her on New Year’s Day on Lindisfarne. I’m not sure such things have been seen in Bosham. That was January - the Romans, my last trip up there - and this is July. The sky, though, is the same uninterrupted blue. The light carves silhouettes on the warming ground.

We came here by happy accident, and I have left the men to doze. I was last in Bosham almost exactly a nine years ago - by a week, I think - and I trace my footsteps in the churchyard, remembering the patterned tea dress and vertiginous heels of my early twenties. The red lipstick, the music the band played, the toffee vodka on the tables. Also ghosts, of a sort.

There are piles of seaweed by the war memorial, some hundred metres from the water, and I wonder how they got there. I watch the sailing types gather their things. There’s a distant wheeze of a foot pump on the air; ropes against metal.

Further back in the village and the windows are full of sleeping things. Ceramic swans and santas, a noticeboard with activities for the “fed up and lonely” (tempting) and £20 lawn edging shears (even more so). On the way down I joked that this would be the land of hollyhocks and so it is; purple and pink and pale yellow. There’s a hit of roses as I edge around the post van.

It has been needed, this little jaunt. So many months in the same space, with the same unanswered questions and anxieties. So many weeks of waiting for sunshine. And now it is here, on skin so early in the day. A new breeze, smelling of drying salt and leftover things, to trouble the cobwebs. How lucky we are! I wonder if we will return in another decade, and I will remember this bench, these tatty plimsolls toe capped with dew, these piles of seaweed.

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