Milena, companion in South Kensington

About Milena

Milena is built on a generous scale and carries it beautifully. She is 175 cm and curvy, her long black hair straight and falling to the middle of her back, her brown eyes going serious when she is concentrating. She dresses for the occasion and rarely for the fashion: a long dress in something heavy, a wrap for the walk, flat shoes in her bag for the way home. In her mid twenties, she is the sort of arrival that makes a hotel lobby pause for a second, and she has never once seemed to notice.

She speaks English calmly and listens more than she talks. Music is her subject, taken seriously since childhood, and she is generous with it rather than superior: she will tell you what to listen for in the second movement and then leave you alone to hear it. She is also funny about the audience, the coughing, the programme rustlers, the man who applauds early. Away from a concert hall she is affectionate and relaxed, and she takes her time about everything.

The Royal Albert Hall is ten minutes from most of the SW7 hotels and it is where her evenings tend to begin. She will take the early part of a promenade season or a winter recital, a box if you have one and the stalls if you do not, and she treats the interval as part of the evening proper, not as a queue for drinks. Afterwards, supper on Thurloe Street or a walk back through the museum quarter with the buildings lit. She lives in South Kensington, a few streets from the hall.

The hall, the museums and the hotels between them are described on the South Kensington page. Message booking with the night, and say if the seats should be looked at while we are about it.

Booking her

For a concert evening, tell the desk the performance and the start time and Cordelia will set the meeting hour with room to spare. Milena asks for four hours when there is music in the plan, since the interval and supper are part of it.

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 Milena

She would have you eat afterwards rather than before, because she dislikes arriving at a concert full and sleepy. So the evening opens with a drink near the hall, twenty minutes of her telling you what the orchestra is about to attempt, and then the walk across to the doors while the crowd is still thin.

She is entirely still through the first half and entirely talkative through the interval. Afterwards you walk out into the Kensington evening with the music still in the room behind you, and supper on Thurloe Street is the right kind of quiet. She keeps a pair of flat shoes in her bag for the way home, which tells you everything about how she plans an evening.