Overnight in E14: she arrives late and stays until it is light

A late arrival, a drink if you want one, and no clock. Somebody sleeps. The point of the format is that neither of you spends the evening working out how much time is left, which is the tax on every shorter booking. Breakfast is ordinary, either sent up or eaten downstairs, and she leaves in daylight rather than at an agreed hour. Time and companionship, across a longer stretch of it, and nothing further is offered or implied.

The rates page counts the overnight as ten hours from the minute she arrives, and in practice those hours fall in much the same pattern every time. She reaches your door between half past ten and eleven. The first hour is the long drink and the conversation that a shorter booking would have had to fit around a clock.

Somewhere past midnight the evening slows of its own accord, and by one somebody is usually asleep. Nobody sets an alarm. From about seven there is coffee, then the breakfast you named when you booked, and she is out of the building a little before nine with the ten hours used and the corridor still quiet.

The Jubilee line runs late out of Canary Wharf and the DLR gives up a good deal earlier, which shapes every other booking on this site and none of this one. An overnight removes the only real constraint an E14 evening has.

It also suits Wapping better than almost any other format, because the warehouse flats along the river are quiet in a way the towers never manage, and quiet is the entire point once it gets past one.

Most overnights happen in the hotels on the estate and along Marsh Wall, where breakfast arrives on a tray without anybody raising an eyebrow. Residents in the Isle of Dogs towers book it at home, which means the morning ends in your own kitchen. And if you fly out of London City Airport at seven, the quay hotels sit ten minutes from the terminal, although that corner is Zone 3 and her ride both ways is quoted in the confirmation before you agree to it.

Ask for the morning you want when you book, not at three in the morning. Some people want coffee and a long silence. Some want the hotel breakfast and a proper conversation. A few want the room to themselves by seven. All three are normal, she will work to whichever you name, and she will not improvise a fourth. If you have an early flight out of the airport, tell Maude the time and the night is built to end well in front of it.

Luna is built for late hours, knows what is on that week and tends to arrive after something else has finished. Patricia takes the river version: the wall in the dark, a single malt, then nothing hurried at all. Violetta is 178 cm, reads other people's letters for pleasure and is very good company at two in the morning. Danielle reads a room in about nine seconds and never mentions that she has. Their pages, and the twenty four others, are on the desk.

The date, the address, the hour you would like her to arrive and the hour you would like the morning to end. That is the whole list. Maude confirms the name and the figure in one message and nothing is added to it later. Change with three hours of notice or more and nothing is owed. If the whole night is more than you want, the rungs below start at £250 on rates, and the order of events is on booking.