I ask how long you are staying before I ask anything else

I ask now, in the first week, how long you are staying. People find it abrupt and one man found it insulting, and I am going to keep doing it, because I have had three partnerships in this city and all three of them ended at an airport.

Nothing dramatic happened in any of them. One finished a contract, one went back for a parent who was ill, one simply decided after a long winter that she had had enough of the sky. None of them lied to me and two told me well in advance. What I got wrong was treating each departure as bad luck rather than as the ordinary weather here.

Thirty five, the south, nine years of rope. I do not think people should stay put on my account. Half the reason I like living here is that it is full of people who came from somewhere else. What has changed is that I now plan around the answer instead of hoping for a different one.

So if you are here for two years, tell me, and I will decide with the information in front of me rather than find out in March. If you are here for good, say that as well, because I would like to know what that is like.

What I am after is one person, a standing evening, a partnership rather than a sequence of good years with nice people. Please do not tell me that everything is temporary really. It is true in a way that has never once helped anybody.