Hospital nights, plain language, and I am not going to dress it up

I push beds and equipment around a hospital between eight at night and eight in the morning, four nights on and four off. When I say my Tuesday is your Saturday I mean it literally, and it has ended two of these before now.

Fifty two, the south east, submissive, eleven years in. The long one ran five years and ended when she was ill and then when she died, and I am telling you that in a personal advertisement because it explains the four years of nothing that follow it and I would rather not be asked later.

I am plain in writing. I have been told it reads as blunt. I do not have a large vocabulary for any of this and I have stopped apologising for that, because in eleven years the vocabulary has never once been the part that mattered.

What I want is somebody to answer to on the off days. Tasks, standing rules, a check on Sunday night. On the working nights I am no use to anybody and I will not pretend I am. Four days of proper attention and four days of nothing is the shape of everything in my life and it works better than people expect.

I do not want anything intense, I do not want to meet anybody's friends, and I do not want a woman who is going to try to get me to change shifts. The shifts pay for the flat. They are not negotiable and neither is my saying so early.