I have done all the travelling for eleven years and I am finished

In eleven years I have been to other people's parts of this city several hundred times and had somebody come out to mine perhaps nine. That is not a number I have inflated for effect. I counted it in January, because I had started to feel unreasonable and wanted to know whether I actually was.

I am not. It happens because I live out where the trains thin out, and because I am agreeable, and because at the start of anything it is easier to say yes to the journey than to raise it. Then it becomes the pattern, and by month six raising it sounds like a complaint about the whole relationship.

Forty three, out past the edge of things, eleven years in and happy at both ends of the rope. What I am after now is not fairness in a strict sense. It is somebody who will look at a map once, work out what they are asking, and offer something without being asked twice.

I have a house, a spare room, a station within walking distance and no housemates. Coming here is genuinely easy and I think most people simply never consider it.

Not looking for anyone who says they love the countryside and then never visits it. Not looking for somebody who wants to meet in the middle every single time, which sounds fair and means neither of us is ever anywhere comfortable. And not looking for anything spontaneous, since spontaneity out here means an hour and a half on a replacement bus.