The twenty-three therapists you can name in a first message

The grid above is the whole roster rather than a shortlist for today. Twenty-three is the number on the books; how many of them have an opening at any given hour is a smaller number, and it moves through the week.

No one on this roster is put on a shift by anybody. Each woman keeps the diary she wrote for herself, which is why the answer to "is she free at nine" is a genuine question with a genuine answer rather than a formality.

Requesting an hour and requesting one particular woman

Those are two different requests and the thread runs faster when they are kept apart. An hour on a Thursday evening is simple to arrange. One particular woman on that Thursday evening may or may not be, and finding out slowly costs you the evening you were trying to use. A message that gives the hour, the length and says whether the name is fixed settles in one exchange rather than four.

If she is not free, the reply says who is, and it stops there. Nobody here talks a guest out of the woman he asked for or into one he did not, so the list that comes back is a list of open hours and nothing more. Choosing from it, or waiting for her instead, is entirely yours to do.

Languages on the books

English is on all twenty-three profiles, which is what most visitors need and the end of the matter. Beyond it, four women speak French, four speak Russian, three speak Ukrainian and three speak Spanish, two speak Romanian, and there are single speakers of Dutch, Italian, Polish, Serbian and Latvian. Five carry a third language as well. The profiles list them without ranking them, because a ranking would tell you nothing useful about a conversation at the door.

Where a journey starts

There are no premises for anyone to leave from, so every arrival begins wherever she lives. Four districts hold the roster between them: seven in the centre, six in the Jordaan, six in Oud-Zuid and four in De Pijp. Across a city this size that usually puts somebody within reach of your address without much ceremony.

It is also why the window does not move. Forty to sixty minutes from a confirmed booking to a knock, the same figure in each central district, counted from the moment she is ready to travel rather than from the moment you decided. Rooms at the Schiphol airport hotels sit outside that window and are arranged on their own terms, with the driving time each way agreed in writing before anything is fixed.

What a profile holds, and what it does not

Her age, her languages, the district she travels from, the formats on her file and her photographs, each of them of her and published with her agreement. The rate table repeats on every profile because the tariff is the same whichever name you pick: 180 euros for an hour with one guest, 270 for ninety minutes, 360 for two hours, 540 for three, and 1,250 for the eight hour block. Two guests, or a second pair of hands, are read off the neighbouring columns of that same table. Nothing is added for the hour of day and nothing is added for crossing the centre.

What a profile does not hold is any statement about what a session includes. She decides that, she says it out loud at the start of the visit, and it stands for the whole of it. She may decline a booking and she may end one. Every woman on this page is twenty-one or over, and so is every guest who books one, which the age statement sets out in full.

Booking one of them

Put her name on the first line, with the address, the hour and the length underneath it. The reply comes back with her availability, the figure and an arrival window. If you saw someone on an earlier visit and remember the name, that is enough to work from; if you remember the evening and not the name, say that instead and it can usually be traced. The booking page sets out the sequence the messages run in.