Laura, companion in Paddington

About Laura

Ask for Laura and you tend to get the same report back: she is the easiest company in a strange city. She is 169 cm and athletic, built by long runs along the canal rather than by any gym, her hair long and light brown with sun-kissed lengths, her eyes green and steady on you. She dresses simply, a good dress and a coat that has seen plenty of London rain, and she never looks like she has spent the afternoon preparing. In her mid twenties, she has the knack of making an unfamiliar hotel feel like somewhere you chose.

Her English is warm and unfussy. She actually wants to know where you flew in from and how bad the journey was, which sounds like small talk and is actually the thing that unknots the first twenty minutes. She swims, runs, and reads late. She laughs easily and drops a subject faster still when a story is going nowhere. Nothing rattles her, including a delayed arrival or a change of plan telephoned through at seven.

Paddington is her own neighbourhood and she treats it as such. She picks the Frontline Club, up the stairs on Norfolk Place, two minutes from the station hotels, where the walls are covered in photographs worth asking about and nobody is performing for anyone. With an hour to spare before dinner she will walk you along the canal at Little Venice instead, which is the part of W2 most guests never see. She lives in Paddington, so the gap between your message and her arrival is a short one.

The walk from the platform and the hotels around it are covered on the Paddington page. Tell booking which day you land and Cordelia keeps an hour open with your train allowed for.

Booking her

If you are arriving by train, give the desk the arrival time rather than a guess at an hour, and Cordelia will set the meeting for after you have checked in. Laura is minutes away from the station hotels and copes calmly with delays.

Her figures are the same figures every companion here works to, printed on the rates page, and the order a booking runs in is on the booking page.

An evening with Laura

The first hour is where she really earns her keep. You have travelled, the room smells of hotel, and she arrives with no agenda except to make the evening yours. One drink downstairs while you decide whether you want to go out at all, and she means it when she says either answer is fine.

If you do go out it is five minutes on foot, not a car. Dinner in a room with photographs on every wall, where she makes you guess which conflict each one came from and is usually wrong on purpose. Afterwards the canal path if the night is dry, with the boats lit and the bridge traffic far away. She gets you back to the hotel before you have to think about the morning.