Auburn and red, three women between the shades

The three

Lea is auburn and wavy, 161 cm, petite, twenty three and hazel eyed, and she is the one who will stop mid sentence for a view. Luna is dark auburn red at 171 cm and curvy, twenty two, and will have read the exhibition notes before you get there. Patricia is auburn brown at 172 cm and slim, twenty eight, thoughtful and unhurried, and lives with the fact that her village keeps no station in it.

Three different evenings

Lea builds a night that does not depend on an Underground line, because Muswell Hill has never had one. Luna works a district shaped entirely by a departure board and is good at filling the gap between a meeting and a train. Patricia plans around a hill that has to be climbed either way. None of that has anything to do with the colour of their hair, which is rather the point of saying it here.

An evening with each

Lea begins at Alexandra Palace, up on its ridge with the transmitter behind her and the southern half of London laid out in front, and she is the one to book if weather is part of the appeal: she will happily stand at the top of the hill and watch a front come in. Reaching her from the middle of town takes the best part of an hour, so she asks for a few hours of notice and prefers three hours or the dinner date to anything shorter.

Luna is twenty two, the youngest of the three, and her evening starts four minutes from Euston station in the free galleries of the Wellcome Collection, among surgical instruments and oddities she somehow manages to make funny. Medicine and its stranger history are what she reads about. Afterwards there is a table and the hotels along the Euston Road, and a guest who has run out of things to say about his journey will find she has plenty to say about everything else.

Patricia takes half an hour to warm up and warns you of it in advance; after that she is excellent company for as long as the evening lasts. Her night belongs to the Flask on Highgate West Hill, a pub built in the sixteen hundreds, all low rooms and a courtyard that fills the moment the weather allows, and to a long conversation about who is buried where in the village. Give her three hours at least, because the hill deserves it. Put simply: Lea for the view, Luna for the timetable, Patricia for the long conversation.

If it was the colour

Blondes runs to four and brunettes to fifteen, and the six with genuinely black hair are under raven haired. If it was the build instead, Lea appears under petite, Luna under curvaceous, and Patricia under both slim and slender and statuesque. Every name on the list works to one ladder of rates.