Not quite MR DARCY

Clara was looking for a romantic hero and it certainly wasn't her ex

- Gabrielle Mullarkey

It 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 did you two split up?' Fi had asked only recently. 'Ian was kind, generous, had a good sense of humour, nice hair and car...'

'Oh, don't get me started on the hair and car,' Clara had retorted, tending to overlook the first three qualities. 'He was always checking his parting in shop windows. And he'd never read Pride and Prejudice, but could quote every episode of Top Gear ever recorded!" However, they had sort of drifted apart rather than definitively split up. From Clara's point of view, it was the way Ian tuned out whenever she talked about olden times, or when he asked her which disease she'd prefer to catch - scurvy or dropsy? 'I'm not looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses,' she'd huff in response.

'I know how my grandparents went without during wartime, the sacrifices their generation made. But there's room too for the romance we seem to have lost - men who'd ask you for the pleasure of this dance, kiss the back of your hand, present you with a rose...'