Jasmin, companion in Hampstead

About Jasmin

At 160 cm she is the shortest woman here and the least troubled by it. Jasmin is petite, and she wears chestnut brown hair long and straight, loose rather than pinned, while her brown eyes give away amusement a beat before her mouth does. She dresses softly: knitwear that looks better than it has any right to, a skirt with movement in it, a coat built for a hill in November. At twenty two she has an old fashioned dress sense that suits Hampstead exactly, where nobody has ever been impressed by a label and everybody notices a good coat.

Her manner is gentle and a little mischievous, and she is far more observant than her quietness suggests. She speaks English and nothing else, carefully, asking whatever follows the obvious question and then waiting properly for the answer. She likes old houses, old gardens and the particular pleasure of a room that has been lived in for three hundred years, and she will happily spend twenty minutes deciding which window in a building she would have chosen for a desk.

An afternoon start suits her best here, beginning at Burgh House on New End Square, a Queen Anne house three minutes from the tube with a small museum inside it and a garden behind. She comes up from Soho, which is thirty minutes on the Northern line and a genuinely unpredictable drive after six, so she takes the train and the lift up from the deepest platforms on the network without complaint. Afterwards the village keeps its shape into the evening: a short walk, a low table, the heath going dark at the end of the lane.

Daylight matters to her more than it does to most, and an afternoon start here is no compromise at all. Write to the desk with a day, and say roughly when you would like to be sitting down; the corners of NW3 she knows best are listed on the Hampstead page.

Asking for her

Jasmin likes to start before the light goes, so an afternoon or early evening booking gets the best of her Hampstead. Ninety minutes at £400 is enough for the house and a walk; an unhurried evening is better.

Every figure she works to is already public on the board, and the order of the evening is set out on the booking page.

An evening with Jasmin

Four o'clock in October, which in Hampstead means the light has about ninety minutes left in it. Jasmin walks rather than takes anything, and she will lead you up a lane you would not have found, past three doors she has opinions about. There is tea somewhere with a fire in it, and she takes her time over it.

When the dark comes down properly the village turns into a different place, lit in patches, quiet by nine. She likes a small table at that hour and a conversation that does not need a subject. If the evening carries on she will suggest the top of the heath for ten minutes, because the whole of London is laid out down there and almost nobody bothers to look.