The unhurried evening: how the office books the girlfriend experience in London
Some guests want a plan and some want the opposite. This one is for the second kind. There is no table to be at by eight, no show to reach and no route agreed in advance. Three hours at £700 or two at £500, spent however the evening turns out to want to be spent, with somebody who is genuinely easy to be around.
It is the least dramatic plan on the board and quietly the most requested by people who come back. When people ask for the girlfriend experience in London, this is usually the plan they mean, and here it is time and company for the hours booked, nothing beyond them. What it asks of you is one honest sentence at the start about what you would like the time to be. What it gives you in return is company that does not feel arranged, and a woman who is not performing an evening at you.
On the board
Suited to the unhurried evening
Note 02
What unhurried actually means
It means the first twenty minutes are allowed to be quiet. It means a walk counts as a plan. It means she will ask what you feel like doing and then take the answer seriously, including when the answer is a pub rather than a dining room, or a coffee and an hour of talking rather than anything at all.
It does not mean vague. The hour, the length and the figure are fixed in writing before she leaves, exactly as they are for every other plan here. It is the middle of the evening that is left open, not the arrangement around it.
Note 03
The first half hour
Most of these evenings start with a drink somewhere you are already comfortable, because the lobby of your own hotel asks less of both of you than a room neither of you has been to. Fifteen minutes in, the shape of the night is usually obvious to her even if it is not yet obvious to you.
Several of the women here are deliberately slow starters and will tell you so on their own pages. Give it the first drink. The difference between minute five and minute forty is the thing this plan is built around.
Note 04
Where it tends to happen
Chelsea is good at it because the district turns back into a neighbourhood after seven and there is a river at the end of every second street. Belgravia is better still for a short one: the squares go silent by nine, you can walk from Motcomb Street to Eaton Square and pass four people, and twenty minutes of that beats another bar.
Any zone on the board works. The plan is about the company rather than the postcode, and the office will say which name is nearest to you.
Note 05
Four who are good at this
Cindy is calm in a way that lowers the temperature of a room and is impossible to hurry. Rosa is warm, funny and completely unembarrassable, and will spend a whole evening on one long story if you keep asking. Sonya is the one who can tell whether a guest wants conversation or company, and she reads it correctly by the second drink. Lea is quiet for the first ten minutes and then not quiet at all, and prefers two or three hours to a whole evening.
Everyone on the who is free page takes this plan. If you would rather not choose, describe the evening and the office will put forward two names with reasons attached.
Note 06
What it is not
It is not a relationship, a rehearsal for one, or a pretence of one that either of you has to maintain. It is a few hours of good company between two adults, booked plainly and ended plainly. The women here are warm because they are warm, not because a page told them to be.
As everywhere else on this board, the figure is for her time and her company only. Nothing further is offered, implied or available, at any length.
Note 07
Things people ask for and are embarrassed to ask for
An hour of talking about work with somebody who has no stake in it. A walk in the rain. Somebody to sit in a hotel bar with so that the room is not silent. Company while you eat, with no conversation required at all. Every one of those is a normal booking and none of them needs a preamble when you write.
The women on this board have heard all of it and a good deal more besides. Saying what you actually want at the start is the single thing that makes an evening better, and it is much easier than steering an evening sideways for three hours hoping she works it out.
Note 08
Length, and when to step up
Two hours at £500 is enough for a drink and a walk. Three at £700 is the usual shape and leaves room for dinner to happen if the evening drifts that way. If you already know you want to eat properly, book dinner and let somebody hold a table instead. If the evening has no end in mind, say so at the start and the office will price the longer booking rather than extending twice on the night.
The whole ladder sits on the rates page, and the fee goes to her in person when she arrives, as it does on every plan.
From The Roundup
Two notes worth reading first
More plans
Other ways an evening is arranged
Last strip
Say a name and an hour
Write in with a length, a time and the zone you are staying in, and a name from the board comes back with a window attached. That is the whole of the arrangement.