Luna, companion in Euston

About Luna

Dark auburn red, long, and unmistakable under any lighting a hotel can throw at it: Luna's hair does a good deal of the introducing. Curvy and 171 cm, she has brown eyes warmer than that colour usually promises, and she dresses with a sense of occasion that Euston Road does not usually get. Velvet in winter, something looser in summer, always one detail chosen on purpose. At twenty two she is the youngest woman working this part of NW1 and by some distance the most likely to have read the exhibition notes beforehand.

She is curious, quick to laugh and entirely without side. She works in English alone, at some speed, and she has the habit of asking what you actually do rather than what you say you do. Her subjects are medicine, oddity and the history of both, which sounds unlikely until you have spent an hour with her in a room full of surgical instruments and watched her make it funny. She is good company for a traveller who is tired of talking about the journey.

Her Euston evening tends to begin at the Wellcome Collection on Euston Road, four minutes from the station, where the free galleries hold everything from Darwin's walking stick to objects nobody should have kept. She arrives from Mayfair, three stops up the Victoria line from Green Park and quicker than any car would be, which suits a booking made around a departure board. Afterwards the hotels along Euston Road and up towards the old church are all within a short walk, so nobody is rushing for anything.

What sits inside a short walk of the platforms is set out on the Euston page. Write to the desk with the two times that bracket your evening, and Luna will fill the gap between a meeting and a train without anybody glancing at a clock.

Asking for her

Luna is used to bookings shaped by a timetable and will happily take a two hour gap between meetings at £500. For a proper evening, tell the desk the last train you need and she will work backwards from it.

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 Luna

Say you have five hours before a train north. Luna suggests starting at the galleries rather than at a bar, because an hour among other people's obsessions gives you something to talk about that is not work. She has favourites in there and will take you straight to them.

Dinner at eight, somewhere between the station and the square, and she is good at picking rooms where a conversation carries. By ten she has checked your platform on her phone without being asked, and the walk back takes four minutes. She is genuinely unbothered by a departure that cuts an evening short; she would rather you caught the train and came back than sat through the last hour watching a clock.