Not Quite MR DARCY

Clara’s friend Fi had invited her on a weekend ‘amble’ with her walking group. ‘Nothing too onerous,’ she assured Clara. ‘A gentle woodland stroll. You won’t need crampons or hiking boots.’

Clara accepted the invite, relieved to hear the walk wouldn’t be out of her comfort zone. She wasn’t generally sold on the ‘outdoors’. A big romantic, her preference would be to ‘promenade’ under a parasol (on a flat surface, maybe some rolling greenery at a push), arm in arm with her attentive beau. She’d often thought she had been born in the wrong century.

‘Which century were you after?’ her ex Ian had snorted. ‘Do you want to go as far back as the witch trials? Or maybe you’d settle for the Victorian era, choking on smog while wearing a laced corset, hardly able to breathe?’

OK, so he’d only been teasing, albeit rather cynically. But in the end, his total absence of a romantic streak was one of the reasons they’d split