Where, exactly. That is the question and I have no answer

Let us begin where every one of these conversations ends anyway. I cannot do any of this where I live. One bedroom in a shared flat, a lease in somebody else's name, and a neighbour behind a wall you could hear a kettle through. Of the eleven conversations I have had this year, seven finished on precisely that point.

Thirty nine, east side, fourteen years of rope and eight of them here. Five flats in that time, exactly one of which was ever suitable, and I lost that one when the owner sold it in a hurry.

What I notice is that people treat this as a small logistical detail to be sorted out later, and it is not. It is the central fact of doing this in this city. It decides who ends up with a standing partnership and who ends up with something occasional whether or not that was ever what they wanted.

I am not asking anybody to have a flat. I am asking for somebody who will treat the where as a joint problem from the first week, with real arithmetic in it, rather than as something that will presumably resolve itself. I have no clever answer and I am suspicious of anybody who claims one, because every arrangement I have seen work here involved somebody accepting a compromise they had not expected to accept.

What I want is one person, over years, twice a week when it is possible, and honesty about what is actually available to us rather than optimism about it.