Jasmin, companion in London Fields

About Jasmin

The towpath is quiet by nine and Jasmin walks it without looking over her shoulder, which is either nerve or six years of London. Petite, 160 cm, hair chestnut brown, long, straight. Her brown eyes hand you the joke a second ahead of the punchline. Small and quick, in a jacket a size too big and trainers she will not apologise for until dinner, at which point the boots come out of the bag.

Early twenties and much better company than that suggests. Her English is fluent and fast, and she has the London habit of shortening everything, names, streets, whole stories. She draws, mostly buildings, mostly badly, and keeps a notebook she will not show you until about the third hour. Ask her about Broadway Market on a Saturday and you get a full weather report on the crowd.

The Dove on Broadway Market is her default setting: the back room, long wooden tables, a beer list nobody has ever finished reading. There is no hotel in London Fields at all, which she considers the best thing about the place, so nights here mean flats, the park in summer and a walk over to Cambridge Heath when the Weaver line is behaving. She comes from Soho, twenty minutes by road at that hour.

London Fields is two minutes from its own platform and nine from Hackney Central, so the last train is rarely the problem people expect. Nothing is hidden on rates. Message booking with an hour and a postcode and it is done inside two replies.

Booking her

Send Nell an address and a start hour; she answers with the minute Jasmin will be there rather than a vague window. Jasmin is happiest with a couple of hours, since she never wants the first stop to be the only one.

Every figure she works to is public on the board, and the steps sit on the booking page.

An evening with Jasmin

Start at the pub and let her run it. Jasmin is a natural organiser of other people's evenings, which sounds exhausting and is not, because she keeps checking that you are actually enjoying the thing she has just invented. One drink by the park, a table she found by walking past it, then the bit she really likes, which is the walk between places.

She will take you down Martello Street and along the railway arches and explain who used to work in each one, about sixty per cent of it accurate. Later, if the weather has behaved, the lido railings and the empty park at midnight. She is small enough to lose in a crowd and loud enough that you never do. By the time the evening ends you have seen four rooms and walked two miles and it did not feel like either.