Nothing here takes long enough to hide behind

Where I lived before, there was an hour of train between meeting somebody and having to be honest with them. You could spend that hour deciding how much to say. Here the whole city is twenty five minutes wide and the question arrives before you have got your coat off.

Forty two, out west, seventeen years of this. It took me a year to stop being ambushed by it. What I do now is have the answer ready, which sounds calculating and is really a courtesy. I know what I want, I can say it in three sentences, and nobody has to spend six weeks extracting it from me.

So, the three sentences. I want one partnership rather than several arrangements. I want two evenings a week, most weeks, over years. I want the rest of it to be an ordinary relationship, with the shopping and the bad moods and everything else that involves. Those three sentences took me about four years to be able to say without hedging every one of them.

The thing I have had to accept is that there is nowhere to hide when it goes wrong either. You cannot drift apart in a city this size. You will see them, and everybody they know. Most people here have made their peace with that and the ones who have not tend to leave.

If you want the long answer, ask me for it. It is the same answer with rather more of my week in it.