The Long View: what the bookings office knows, written down

Every bookings office gathers a store of small facts that nobody ever writes down: which gallery is quiet at seven, which dining room keeps one table apart from the rest, which hotels change character in the school holidays. The Long View is where Tamsin writes them down. It is called that because most of what makes an evening good is decided well before it begins, in the choice of room, the order in which things are arranged and the hour, and those are the things these notes are about.

The first ten range across the house's twelve districts. A small exhibition room on Brook Street, the dining room above The Audley, and the reason Mount Street is pink. The table inside a curtain of light on Park Lane, the painters' club in Chelsea, and the hour after a reception at Lancaster House in St James's. Half term in Knightsbridge, Art Basel from Mayfair, and two notes on manners: holding the table before you write, and what to say when someone you know stops beside it. More follow through the autumn and the winter.

Nothing here is paid for. No hotel, restaurant, bar or club has any arrangement with this house, and each is named only as a place a guest might choose for himself. What a place charges and when it opens are its own business and alter from season to season, which is why neither is recorded here. Our own figures do not change: £250 for an hour, £900 for a four hour dinner and £1,800 for a night, set out on the rates page and handed to your companion in person when she arrives. Every companion has her own page on The Hang. When a note turns into a plan, write to Tamsin.