Red Lion Inn in Brede, Sussex

The Red Lion is a fairly unprepossessing roadside country pub from the outside, but step through the door and you'll find huge oak beams, an open hearth, and cosy nooks. Dating back to the fifteenth century, the pub now boasts a restaurant with imaginative contemporary food.

While we were at the bar the chef wandered past, wondering if we were staying for dinner. The fish was fresh from Hastings that morning. We had bream with a sort of deconstructed paella - although not described in quite those terms - and another fish dish with potatoes dauphinoise and fresh peas in a veloute sauce.

There is a point to this. Instead of local councils having stupid sister city relationships with arbitrary places in China, Japan and elsewhere, whose only purpose seems to be to facilitate junkets for local councillors, why not have sister pub relationships for the people. We could start with Grazing Restaurant at the Royal Hotel in Gundaroo and the Red Lion Inn in Brede. The respective local councils could re-allocate their sister city budgets to fund it.

James Daniel Selmes from Brede, Sussex

Driving from Rye to Hastings a few weeks ago, I noticed a turn-off to Brede, the village in Sussex where Mary Ann (Eliza Jane) Faulkner's father, James Daniel Selmes, was born in 1835 or thereabouts. (All I know is that he was 22 when he married Amelia Howarth in Tumut on 23 June 1857, his father was a farmer and his mother's name was Maria Cook.)

Most of the old gravestones in Brede's Church of England graveyard (pictured) are illegible, but one can be made out. It is the grave of a Mary Ann Selmes, wife of another James Selmes, who died on 12 February 1875.

Although most of the Selmes in the world can apparently be traced back to Sussex, no-one in the Red Lion Inn knew anyone by that name.