The business evening: a plus one who has read the guest list

Send the desk the setting, the hour, and one line about each person she will meet. Not dossiers: a name, a role, and anything that would be awkward to discover at the table. That is genuinely all it takes, and the women who do this work will have it memorised before they leave the house.

If you want an agreed account of how the two of you know each other, say so and it is agreed beforehand rather than improvised over the first course. Several of the women here will ask for it themselves if you do not raise it. Nobody is ever going to be asked a question at that table that she has not already decided how to answer.

Margo is the name for a room where discretion is the whole point. She dresses conservatively, is never the loudest thing at dinner, and rescues a conversation that has gone flat without anybody noticing she did it. Laura will hold her own at a table of colleagues and then let you take the credit for having invited her.

Violetta suits formal evenings and occasions where a guest is being introduced. Michelle makes an evening look effortless and hands you the credit. Sonya confirms her own arrival time and holds to it, which on the night of something that starts at seven sharp is worth more than charm.

Westminster keeps hours nowhere else in the zone attempts. It empties at seven and fills again at eight, and a dinner there is quite often arranged at half past nine for eleven. Margo comes in from Knightsbridge in fifteen minutes and would far rather be twenty minutes early than one minute late. Laura travels from Paddington in twenty.

Holborn is the fastest door in the eastern half of the zone, a minute from two lines, and it is where the large receptions actually happen. The Kingsway hotels are five to eight minutes on foot from most of those rooms, which means a guest can leave a reception and be somewhere quiet inside ten minutes without a car.

Tell the desk what the room is and she arrives dressed for it, neither under it nor above it. Black tie, business, or the difficult middle category that invitations describe as smart and mean nothing by. If you are unsure, describe the venue instead and she will work it out.

Arrival is straightforward: she meets you where you say, at the hour agreed, rather than being pointed at a room full of strangers. Leaving is more straightforward still. She goes at the finishing hour without making an occasion of it, which is the part experienced guests value most and the part nobody thinks about beforehand.

Most of these evenings run to three hours at £700 or four at £900, because a reception and a dinner rarely fit into two. An hour at £250 covers a drinks event you intend to leave early, and a night that runs on to morning is on the ten hour line at £1,800. Every figure is on rates and none of them moves for the occasion.

Notice matters more here than anywhere else on the site. An event wants a day or two so that the brief can be read properly, and a black tie evening wants the same. Write to booking with the date, the venue, the hour and the names, or start from On The Books if you already have somebody in mind.