I’ve alighted on the immediate problem with Rupert: it’s that I am here for tidy labor exchange, and he wants companionship, someone to participate in a small-scale domestic relationship with him. He wants to squabble about laundry and ask me for a few euro when we’re going in for bread, and I want him at a decorous distance, holding up his end of the deal to house and feed me while I wash and paint his home.

Yesterday we had it out a bit about me disliking when people (…) talk to me about how I look, and he called me prickly. I, supercilious, cited 25 years of people’s unsolicited opinions on my body and he said Others don’t have that problem and I said You’re right; I am prickly.