I would like to take over a garden, on her instructions, for years

I would like to take over a garden. Somebody else's, to her instructions, over years rather than a season, with her deciding what goes where and me doing the digging and being told plainly when I have got it wrong.

Fifty nine, out in the commuter belt, I was a groundsman until my knees objected and now I do three days a week at a nursery. I have a car, a trailer and every Saturday of the year.

None of this is a metaphor and there is nothing sexual in it. I have tried explaining that to two women who assumed I was being delicate, and I was not. The thing I want is the being told. I have spent an entire working life being handed a plan by somebody who knew what they wanted, and the happiest years were the ones where that person cared how it turned out.

If a dynamic grows around it, good, and I would like it to in time, because I am lonely in the ordinary way men my age are and I would rather say so than dress it up. But the garden is the offer and it stands on its own feet.

No money, no arrangement where I am kept, and I will not take petrol money either because it complicates something simple. Not looking to move house. Not looking for anybody who wants a landscaper for one season and a hedge cut annually thereafter. Not looking to be somebody's project.