Rosa, companion in Finsbury Park

About Rosa

Curls first, always: the chestnut brown hair is long, properly curly, and she made peace years ago with what rain does to it. At 160 cm and curvy, she has brown eyes that are quick to laugh, and she dresses in colour at a time when everybody around her is wearing grey. Nothing fussy, nothing that needs handling, but never black for the sake of it. At twenty five she has the useful quality of looking entirely at home in a scruffy bar and an expensive one, and she genuinely does not prefer either.

She is warm, loud when it suits her and very quick to spot a person who needs the evening slowed down. She has English on its own and speaks it with her hands as much as her voice. Food is the subject she will not be moved off: what to order, where it is better, why the second best place on a street is usually the first best. She can get a table of strangers behaving as though they had met before.

Her Finsbury Park evening usually starts at the Faltering Fullback on Perth Road, six minutes from the station and famous for a garden that climbs up the back of the building in terraces and platforms until it runs out of pub. She comes up from Marylebone, which is a short hop to Oxford Circus and four stops on the Victoria line, twenty minutes in total and no drama. Afterwards she walks north to Green Lanes, where the grills and bakeries keep going long past midnight and nobody has ever eaten badly by accident.

Appetite is a real planning question on Green Lanes, so say how hungry you expect to be when you write to the evening desk. Rosa plans around the answer, and the garden pubs, the grills and the true distance from the barriers are set out on the Finsbury Park page.

Asking for her

Rosa books around food rather than around a clock, and she will tell you where to eat before she tells you anything else. Two hours at £500 is enough for one place; three at £700 lets her show you two.

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 Rosa

Eight on a warm Friday, and the garden behind the pub is a vertical village of tables under ivy and fairy lights, which sounds ridiculous and works perfectly. Rosa knows which level catches the last of the sun and will have claimed it twenty minutes before you arrive.

Then Green Lanes, which is a fifteen minute walk or four minutes in a car, and where the ovens are still going at eleven and the bread arrives before you have decided anything. She orders too much on purpose and pushes the plates around the table. Getting home from here is simple at any hour: two tube lines, the mainline, and buses all night along the same road. She will point you at the right stop without being asked to.