Meeting the train, meeting the plane, or coming with you
This page holds two different bookings. The short one is a companion meeting an arrival, or keeping you company before a departure, at St Pancras, Kings Cross or one of the airports. The long one is travelling together, for a weekend, a week, or a run of meetings in another city. They sit on one page because a single rule governs both: the timetable is agreed first, and the evening is built around it.
Airport bookings run to three hours as a minimum, the journey counted within them and quoted as a single total, the cab priced both ways where an address sits beyond Zone 2. Trips away are quoted around your plans rather than read off the rail, because the hours, the room and the flights all differ. A weekend is priced as a weekend, never as a stack of ten hour nights added together.
Who suits this call
A shortlist rather than the whole company. If none of these is free on your night, the desk will name three more who carry the same evening just as well.
The three hour rule at the airports
Heathrow and Gatwick are not five minutes from the Piazza, and an hour out there would be forty minutes of a companion sitting in traffic. Three hours is therefore the shortest airport booking, the travelling counted inside it and the whole thing quoted as a single figure before you agree to anything. The London termini are a different matter: Euston, Kings Cross and St Pancras all sit in Zone 1, so a train met at nine and a room by half past is an ordinary booking at ordinary figures.
Meeting an arrival properly
Send the train or the flight number with the booking and the desk watches it rather than trusting a timetable. Nobody stands in an arrivals hall holding a name card. The sensible version is a bar inside the station or a hotel lobby two minutes from it, the champagne bar under the Barlow shed being the obvious one for a Paris train. If you land two hours late the booking moves with you wherever her night allows, and the desk says honestly when it cannot rather than leaving you guessing at a gate.
Trips away, and how they are quoted
Tell the desk where, when, how many nights and roughly what the days look like, and a figure comes back covering her time across the whole arrangement. Flights, rooms and any visa business are booked by you and in your name, and she keeps her own documents with her throughout. The figure is written into the thread before anything is booked, and her time is settled at the start of the trip rather than at the end of it.
She is not on duty for every hour
A trip is not one night repeated five times. There are hours you will be working and hours she will be doing her own thing, and the arrangement written down before you leave says which is which. Most settle into evenings together and loose days, with one or two fixed things in them. Anything you would like her present for, a dinner, a meeting afterwards, an event, belongs in that plan at the start rather than sprung on the morning of the day.
Names who travel well
Nora meets the Paris trains often enough to know which end of the platform empties first, honey blonde, hazel eyed and easy in a station bar at any hour. Vanessa is never in a hurry about anything, which is precisely the temperament a two hour delay rewards. Laura is athletic, quick to answer in the afternoon and good with a plan that changes twice. Cindy is at her best in daylight, which counts for more on a trip than it does in WC2. Two of the four are blondes.
What is never part of a travel booking
Her documents are hers, her return journey is booked from the start, and she keeps her own phone and her own money throughout. Nothing about a trip is open ended: it has a written beginning and a written end, and she travels home on the date agreed whatever happens in between. If plans change mid trip, the extra days are agreed and paid for in the same way the first ones were, and the desk stays reachable through all of it, at every hour.
This evening, answered
No, and the reason is honest rather than commercial: the journey out and back eats most of it. Three hours counts the travelling inside the total and is quoted as one figure, so there is no second number waiting for you at the end of the night.
At a hotel or a bar rather than in an arrivals hall. Send the flight number, the desk tracks it, and you will have a fixed place and a fixed time in writing before you take off.
Yours. Flights and rooms are arranged and paid for by you, in your own name, and she travels with her own documents. The figure quoted by the desk covers her time across the arrangement and covers nothing else.
A weekend can sometimes be put together in forty eight hours, though a week or two is more comfortable and gives you a real choice of company. Anything needing a visa takes considerably longer, and the desk says so plainly rather than promising a date it cannot keep.
Written for this evening
Other evenings
Call the stage door
One message names the evening you want and the desk answers inside a quarter of an hour, at any point on the clock. Tell us the day, the hour, how long you would like and where she should come, and the rest is written down for you.
Running order
- Half hour
- Beginners
- YouCurtain up
- Interval
- Final bow