This advert has sat unfinished in a drafts folder for two years

I have led for eleven years and never once advertised. This has sat unfinished since the winter before last, because every version I wrote sounded either like a job description or like a woman trying to be impressive, and I could not decide which was worse.

Thirty eight, Salford, eleven years, two arrangements, the longer of them six years, ended last spring when he took work abroad and neither of us pretended it could be run from there.

The reason I have finally posted is that the way I have always found people has stopped producing anybody. Somebody knows somebody, and then one year nobody does, and you realise it was never a method at all. It was a small number of people who happened to be paying attention, and two of them have moved away.

What I want is domestic and long. A man in the ordinary machinery of my week, duties that hold whether or not either of us is in the mood for them, a fixed day, and standards I set and then enforce. I am particular and I am not gentle about it. Both of my arrangements would tell you so and both stayed for years.

Nothing here is professional and nothing is for hire, in either direction. What I do not want is a man who has been waiting for permission, because I cannot issue that, and I have watched two people lose a year finding it out.