I am local too, which means I am the one who gets recognised

Everybody writing on this board seems to assume the single man is the one with nothing to lose. I was born about two miles from where I am sitting, I went to work with half the people I grew up with, and my aunt still lives in the same street. I am at least as findable as you are.

What that means in practice is that I do not meet anybody within a couple of miles of home, I do not put my face anywhere, and I will ask you to be careful in ways that some couples find a bit rich coming from a single man. One woman told me, not unkindly, that she had never had a man ask her to be discreet before and that she had to go away and think about how it landed.

Thirty seven, Salford, seven years in this. Two arrangements, one of three years and one much shorter that ended over precisely this: they wanted to meet somewhere I could not be seen and could not understand why I was being awkward about a perfectly nice place.

We are in the same position, then, which I think is an advantage rather than a complication. Two people who understand the geography of a city like this will arrange things better than one careful couple and one man who privately thinks it is all a bit dramatic.

I can host. The flat is mine and there is nobody else in it, and that is the one part of all this that is simple.