The girlfriend experience, taken at an airport pace

Nothing is rushed at the door. The kettle goes on, shoes come off somewhere in the middle of it, the day gets taken apart in the order it actually happened rather than summarised. Angelika is direct about that: she would rather arrive at nine, when the shower has happened and the flight has worn off, than at eight while you are still looking for an adaptor.

That half hour does most of the work. After it the evening has a shape of its own and nobody has to steer it, which is the difference between a booking that felt good and one that merely happened.

Company, conversation and an easy few hours. The fee is for her time and her company, exactly as it is on every other page here, and the warmth is not a code for anything additional. Nothing further is offered by this desk or implied by this format, and no companion here is under any obligation beyond the hours booked.

Said the other way round: you are booking the manner of the evening, not an extra. If a page anywhere promises you more under this heading, it is selling something this desk does not.

Out at Harlington the evening can start with twenty minutes down the old lane to the church and back, which resets a day better than a third drink. In Hayes there is a theatre, a canal and an enormous former record factory, and a guest four weeks into a contract there usually wants an evening that feels like a normal one rather than an airport one.

Inside the perimeter it is all indoors, and that is fine too. There is simply nothing to walk to, so the room does the work. The desk will tell you which of the two you are actually dealing with before you book.

Lucy gets a story out of you before you have registered that you were telling one, and is just as happy to stop. Molly has the loudest laugh on the list and is the easiest company for a man who has been serious since seven in the morning. Liana is even tempered to a degree that is genuinely unusual, and asks good questions and then waits.

Nora is cheerful and dry and likes a town with something in it. Between them and the rest of the early twenties and late twenties profiles there is no shortage of people this fits. Describe the evening rather than the face and the desk will name two.

This format is the one that suffers most from being cut short, because the first half hour is an investment rather than a performance. Three hours at £700 is the minimum at this airport and it is the shortest version that works. Four or five is better, and an overnight better still if the morning allows it.

If you are choosing between a late evening and the night before an early flight, take the night before. A booking that starts at one in the morning and has to finish before a six o'clock alarm helps nobody, and the desk will say so rather than take it.

There is one more thing worth saying about length here. Nobody is asked to extend at the door, and no companion on this list will suggest it. If the evening wants another hour, you ask the desk and the desk asks her, which keeps the last hour of a booking as easy as the first. The terms for all of that are on booking.