Photo by Alessandro Ceccarelli/Millennium Images, UK

Well that’s it, summer is finally over. There is still plenty of green in the leaves, but you know it’s a perennial losing battle. Once again, as I find myself looking out of the window on the trains to and from London and Brighton, which has some of the most beautiful countryside in the country (the view from the Ouse Valley Viaduct breaks my heart, in a good way, every time I see it), I reproach myself for not having walked in them, up hill and down dale. Each spring, I say to myself: “This summer I’ll do it.” You might not think I’m a fan of the countryside, but I assure you I am. Some of you might remember I lived for a year in a very remote part of Scotland – during the cold half of the year without heating – and I still loved it.

However, in my defence, there are difficulties. The first is that I don’t have a car and getting to a lovely place that would take me 20 minutes to drive to would take well over an hour on a bus.…