Sonya, companion in Hounslow Central

Hazel eyes in a face that long ago stopped trying to impress anybody, which is exactly why people look twice. Sonya has an athletic build, 162 cm, and dark brown hair that she wears long and straight, and the composure of someone in her early thirties who knows precisely what kind of evening she is good at. Knightsbridge is her address. Hounslow she came to through work and stayed with through preference, because a town with its own life beats a hotel on a perimeter road.

She is direct and warm in equal measure. No flattery, no act, and a laugh that turns up when something is actually funny. Her English runs fluent and unhurried, and she is comfortable in a silence, which is rarer than it sounds. Guests who have been talking at people all day tend to book her for exactly that reason and then find themselves talking anyway, because she asks well.

Her Hounslow evenings often start with twenty minutes in Lampton Park, which sits ten minutes north of the station and is a proper park with old trees rather than a strip of grass beside a road. It resets a head that has been in a car or an aircraft all day. From there the town centre is a short walk, the restaurants stay busy, and the Piccadilly line puts the terminals a quarter of an hour away when the morning comes.

The TW3 detail is set out on Hounslow Central. Give the desk the hotel or the address, the night and the hour, and tell her if you want that walk before dinner, because it needs daylight. Booking covers the rest.

She likes a beginning that happens outdoors, however short. Hounslow has more green in it than its reputation suggests, and half an hour of it before dinner changes the whole evening, particularly for a guest who has been in an aircraft or a meeting room since morning. She walks at a conversational pace and lets the day come out of you in pieces.

Dinner is on the high street or in the hotel, whichever suits your morning. Afterwards she is in no rush at all. She is at her best in the last hour, when the talking has slowed and neither person is performing. She books her own car home and she never makes a guest feel responsible for the logistics of it.