Karolina, companion in Highgate

About Karolina

Tall enough to be remembered and composed enough not to mind, Karolina has a slim 174 cm frame, black hair kept long and straight, and a brown gaze that stays on you a beat past the polite interval. She dresses in long lines and quiet colours, clothes that do nothing in a photograph and everything across a table, and she owns proper shoes for a hill because Highgate punishes anything else. At twenty seven she has the stillness of somebody who is comfortable arriving somewhere before everybody else and simply waiting.

In company she is dry, well mannered and, after the first twenty minutes, genuinely funny, by which point she has decided what sort of evening this will be. There is only English, and she speaks it beautifully, with a preference for a long sentence where a short one would do, which she will admit is a fault and has no plans to correct. She likes gardens, old churches and the sort of local history that nobody has bothered to write down properly.

Her Highgate evening often opens at Lauderdale House in Waterlow Park, a white sixteenth century house halfway down the hill with a terrace looking south over the whole city. She comes up from Covent Garden, which is a Northern line run to Archway and then either the hill on foot or ten minutes in a car, and she will tell you honestly that the village has no station in it: Highgate tube sits down on Archway Road, nine minutes below the High Street, and the walk back up at midnight is real. She plans around that rather than pretending otherwise.

Highgate rewards planning, since the village keeps no station and the hill has to be climbed either way. That ground is explained on the Highgate page. Give the desk a night and an address, and Karolina will tell you honestly how early she has to leave to arrive unhurried.

Asking for her

Karolina asks for a clear address in Highgate rather than a postcode, since the hill hides half its lanes from a map. Three hours at £700 leaves room for the park, a table and the walk between them.

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 Karolina

Six o'clock in summer, the park gates still open, and Karolina waiting on the terrace with the city doing its evening trick below. She is good at long views and better at not talking through them. Half an hour there, then down through the park and up the other side into the village, which takes a quarter of an hour and earns you a drink.

The pubs on the hill fill early and empty early, and she likes them for exactly that. By ten there is space at the good tables and the noise has dropped to something conversational. She will walk you back rather than end the evening at a bar, and she treats the hill down to the station at midnight as a fact of life rather than an inconvenience.