I will always take a recommendation over the best letter ever written

I have never once taken on a man on the strength of what he wrote to me. Not once in twenty one years. Every arrangement I have had began with somebody I trusted saying a sentence about him, usually in passing, usually about something unrelated.

That is not snobbery and it is not laziness about reading. It is that a letter shows me how well somebody writes and nothing else, and I have been shown, more than once, how completely a man can be one thing in writing and another in a house.

Forty five, Didsbury, twenty one years leading, three arrangements, the longest eleven years.

I know what this sounds like to a man with nobody to speak for him, and I am aware it is unfair to newcomers and people who cannot be public. So here is the useful part. What I am relying on is not a formal reference. It is that somebody has watched you behave over time. That accumulates by turning up, being unremarkable and not being a nuisance, over a couple of years, and it is available to anybody prepared to be patient.

What I want is a long domestic arrangement. Duties, standing rules, a man woven into an ordinary week rather than visiting it.

Nothing about this is professional, nothing is for hire, and there is no money in it in either direction. I mention that because this city has a lot of confusion about it and I would rather not spend another year answering the question.