The ten hour night: dinner, the small hours, and breakfast inside the figure

A start between eight and ten is the common one. Dinner, or the end of dinner if you have eaten already. A walk if the weather allows it, and in the middle of London at midnight it very often does. Then back, and the rest of the night belongs to whoever booked it rather than to a programme.

Morning is the part guests underestimate. Room service, a pot of coffee, the newspapers, a conversation that has nowhere to be. She leaves at the hour the booking says, and she says so before it arrives rather than looking at her phone and standing up.

Milena is straightforward about being better across a long booking than a short one, and guests who book her for an evening tend to book her for a night next. Liana spends the first twenty minutes of any booking letting you arrive properly, which matters more at eleven at night than at seven. Luna is louder at dinner and much quieter afterwards, which surprises people who have only seen her photographs.

Bianka is no use at six and very good at eleven, by her own account and by everybody else's. Danielle keeps her phone away for the whole booking and does not watch the time, which sounds like a small thing until you have spent a night with somebody who does.

Mayfair and the wider W1 postcode carry most of them, partly because the hotels there are built for it and partly because three of the women on this list live inside Mayfair itself and are not crossing London at one in the morning to get home. Milena comes in from South Kensington in twenty five minutes; Luna is often at a Mayfair door within half an hour of the desk confirming.

A private flat is arranged on exactly the same terms, with the street, the block and the floor confirmed once instead of a room number. Nothing else about the night differs. Which of the twenty eight take ten hour bookings is worth asking before you choose, and On The Books is the place to start.

The start hour and the finishing hour, in writing, both of them. Whether there is dinner in it or whether you are meeting after one. Whether breakfast is coming to the room or being eaten downstairs, because that decides what she packs. A day or two of notice is genuinely useful here, not because the desk is fussy but because a night through to morning has to be cleared out of a diary rather than slotted into it.

Everything else is deliberately unplanned. Give her a start and a finish and the hours between them fill themselves, which is the whole argument for booking ten of them.

£1,800 for the ten hours, handed to her in person in the first minute she is through the door. Travelling inside Zones 1 and 2 is already inside it. A start at midnight costs the same as a start at eight, and nothing lands at the end of the morning.

Two things move a total on this site and neither of them is the hour: how long you book, and a journey that leaves Zone 2. Both are written out in whole pounds before anybody sets off. The seven lines are on rates, and booking explains the four line message and the single check that follows it.