Dinner near the airport, ordered before the kitchens shut

One hotel on the row has a courtyard under glass, which gives an evening somewhere to sit that is neither a corridor nor a bedroom, and that changes a dinner more than the menu does. TW6 2AQ faces the northern runway if you want aircraft with the first course.

Fifteen minutes east, Hounslow has an actual high street, and it does South Asian food better than most of central London and keeps doing it past ten. Michelle will choose somewhere, walk you there in under a quarter of an hour and order more than you intended to eat. That is the best dinner within reach of this airport, and it is not in a hotel.

Plenty of these evenings never leave the room and are none the worse for it. A tray at half past ten, the curtains pulled on a taxiway, and the conversation going where it wants without a waiter arriving every eight minutes has a great deal to recommend it, particularly after a long haul flight.

The companions know this and none of them treats it as a downgrade. Danielle is candid that she prefers the hotel dining room on a quiet Tuesday to a restaurant that has to be reached, and Karolina would rather come at ten and skip the food altogether than sit down to a rushed nine o'clock table.

From Hayes and Harlington the Elizabeth line reaches Paddington in a little under twenty minutes and Bond Street a few minutes after that, with no change either way. A guest based there can genuinely eat in town and be back before the last train without the evening turning into an expedition.

The same is true, slightly less comfortably, from the central terminals. It costs you the journey at both ends and gives you a proper dining room in return. The desk will say plainly whether the hours you are holding make that sensible or merely possible.

Something that looks right in a lobby at eleven at night and announces nothing at all. Dark, simple, correct for the building and forgettable by morning. These are business hotels full of people in the same clothes they flew in, and a companion who is very obviously dressed for somewhere else is the only thing anyone would notice.

If the table is a real restaurant in Harlington or Hounslow rather than a hotel, say so when you book, and she will dress for that instead. It is a small thing that makes the whole evening sit more easily.

Michelle and Sonya both treat the Hounslow high street as their own and will have decided where you are eating before the car sets off. Bianka reads the hotel menu in advance and has an opinion about the fish. Vanessa knows which junction four buildings are worth a table and which are worth a tray.

For a longer evening that begins with dinner and does not end with it, the shapes on overnights usually suit better than stacking hours onto a table booking.

Then the table moves, or it disappears and the evening becomes something else. Send the new time the moment you have it. Three hours of notice or more and everything slides without cost, including a restaurant booking the desk made on your behalf.

Inside two hours, half the figure holds. The one thing that helps nobody is silence, because a table for two at half past eight has to be given up by somebody. How the rest of it works is on booking.