Everybody optimises for the biggest pool and I went the other way deliberately. The platform I use has a few hundred active people within reach of me and I know a fair number of them by name. That sounds like a disadvantage until you notice that a small place with a memory behaves completely differently from a large place without one. People are careful there, because they will still be there next year and so will everybody they were careless with.
Fifty five, the Jersey side, dominant, twenty three years in, two long arrangements, the second of which ended amicably last autumn.
The trade is obvious and I am not going to soften it. I will not be meeting somebody new every week, my options are genuinely limited, and the same faces come round. In exchange I have never once been lied to about anything material, because in a small place that is not survivable.
What I want is an ongoing structured arrangement with somebody in a sensible radius who wants years of it. Weekly if possible, service led, written terms, a review each season.
Not looking for anybody who wants variety, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want and is simply not on offer here. Not looking for somebody who will find a small pool claustrophobic by month three. And not looking to be a local convenience while the real search happens across the river.