Nora, companion in Holborn

Holborn is the part of the middle that most visitors walk through rather than into, and Nora thinks that is a waste. She is 166 cm with an athletic build, honey blonde hair worn long, hazel eyes, and at 26 she has the kind of energy that makes an ordinary Tuesday feel like an occasion worth dressing for. She arrives looking as though she has walked the last part of the way, and usually she has.

Fluent English, fast and warm. She is curious about everything and slightly incapable of pretending otherwise, which means you will end up explaining your job in more detail than you intended and enjoying it. She cycles, climbs at a wall south of the river twice a week, and reads architecture books for pleasure, which is relevant to what follows. She is talkative without being tiring, mostly because she asks more than she tells, and she is completely without cynicism, which is unusual and rather restful.

Her Holborn evening starts at Sir John Soane's Museum on Lincoln's Inn Fields, which opens for candlelit evenings a few times a month and is the single strangest and best hour in this postcode. Dinner afterwards is usually somewhere on Great Queen Street, five minutes away, and the Kingsway hotels about six. She comes across from Paddington, twenty five minutes at that time of night, and she would rather give you the true number than a flattering one. She sends you the opening times herself rather than leave it to chance, and she checks them again the day before.

See the Holborn page for the streets she covers. Figures by duration are kept under rates. Give booking a date and she will build the first hour around whatever is open.

Nora is happiest with an hour of something before dinner and will suggest what is open that week. Tell Romilly the date and the hotel and she will build the evening around it.

Every figure she works to is on the board of rates, and the rest is one message away.

Nora likes an evening with something in it. Not a full programme, just one hour that gives the night a shape: a candlelit museum, a late gallery, a walk around the Inns of Court when the lamps come on and the lawyers have gone home. She is a genuinely good guide, unshowy about it, and she never lectures.

Dinner afterwards is fast and good rather than long and grand, and then the pace drops properly. She is at her most relaxed in the last part of a booking, sitting somewhere with her shoes off, still asking questions. Guests who expect the energy to be exhausting are usually surprised by how restful the second half turns out to be. She is honest about the hour she needs to leave and she never stretches it.