The small formal things, done every week, are what I actually want

Boots cleaned properly, which takes twenty minutes and not the four people think. Coats hung and brushed. Shoes on trees. The hall kept as it should be so that leaving the house is never a search. Those small formal jobs, done on a fixed evening, are the part of this I have spent fifteen years wanting.

Forty four, the west. The one long arrangement I have had ran nine years and ended when she remarried and moved, and we parted well. In nine years the standing duties barely changed and I never once found them dull, which is either a virtue or a diagnosis.

What appeals is the exactness. There is a right way to do all of it and it can be got wrong, and being told it is wrong and doing it again is the whole mechanism. Somebody who is particular is a gift. Somebody who says it is fine when it is not ruins the thing entirely.

So I am looking for a household with actual standards rather than a woman who would like to have some and is hoping I know what they are. I do not want to design somebody else's protocol. I want to be handed one.

What I do not want: anything sexual, anything performed for an audience, anything where the duties are symbolic. And nothing involving money either way, which I say because the last conversation I had began well and ended with somebody explaining her expectations about gifts, and I withdrew.