I t will be a gentle woodland stroll with my walking group,’ Clara’s friend Fi had assured her. ‘Nothing too onerous. You won’t need crampons or hiking boots.’
Clara accepted the invitation, relieved to hear that 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 had often thought she’d 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 had only been teasing, albeit rather cynically. But in the end his total absence of a romantic streak was one of the reasons they had broken up (she told herself).
‘Actually, why
