I answer letters on two Sundays a month and that is not a game

I read what arrives during the week and I answer on the first and third Sunday of the month. That is not a test of anybody's patience and it is not a technique. It is that I work six days and the only hours I have for correspondence are the ones I have deliberately set aside for it.

Forty seven, the city centre, twenty years leading, three arrangements, the longest of them ten years and ended two years ago when he died.

The men who cannot manage the tempo tell me so, usually by writing again on the Wednesday to check the first one arrived. I hold it against nobody and I do note it, because an arrangement with me runs at this speed permanently. If a fortnight feels like being ignored now, then a Tuesday when I am busy will feel like abandonment later on, and neither of us wants to discover that in year two.

What I want is a long domestic arrangement. Duties that hold across ordinary weeks, a fixed day, and a man who can be completely certain of me without needing to be told so.

Nothing is for hire and no money moves in either direction. What I do not want is to be advised that I would find somebody faster by answering faster. I know. Finding somebody faster is not what I am trying to do.