I have two hours a week and I am not going to pretend I have five

I used to promise more than I had. Not deliberately. I would meet somebody, want it to work, and describe a version of my week that did not exist, and then spend four months quietly cancelling and watching a decent man decide he had been unimportant all along.

So now I say two hours. Fifty two, the Bronx, a job that takes everything, and a mother two blocks away whose care is mine to organise. Two hours a week, one fixed evening, and everything else happens in writing.

What surprises people is how much fits into two reliable hours when the rest of the week is properly structured around them. Duties done at home. A report at a set time. Instructions that take five minutes to give and two days to carry out. The evening is where things are checked and corrected, not where the arrangement lives.

Nineteen years of this and the best arrangement I ever had was built on ninety minutes a week for six years.

What I want is a man who reads that as a real offer rather than as a limitation to be negotiated upwards. If you write back asking whether it might become more, the answer is that it might, in some future year, and that the arrangement has to be worth having if it does not. Nothing here involves money, gifts or anything resembling either, and I will not discuss it further than that sentence.