Companions for Longford, UB7, at the western end of the Bath Road

A hamlet with a runway at the end of it

Two watercourses run through Longford, both of them artificial and both centuries old, which is a strange thing to find a few hundred metres from a runway. The old road through the village was the main route west out of London long before anything took off nearby. There are two pubs and a handful of houses and that is the entire inventory.

It is quieter than anyone expects. The aircraft are overhead rather than beside you, the Bath Road traffic thins after nine, and the last hour of an evening here is genuinely peaceful. What it is not is a place with options: if you want a choice of restaurants you are going somewhere else, and this page would rather you knew that now.

Three sets of rooms, one of them on the doorstep

One hotel sits on the Bath Road at Longford, which makes it the hotel of this village and the one most bookings on this page happen in. TW6 2GD is joined to Terminal 5 by a walkway, five minutes from the gates and the easiest room at the airport to reach without going outside. A third is at Colnbrook, SL3 0FF, a short run west.

Each of these is named because guests stay in it. No arrangement exists with any of them, none of them is told a companion is expected, and she arrives as a visitor meeting a guest, which is all anybody needs to know.

Twenty minutes on foot to the gate, or five in a car

Heathrow Terminal 5 station is about twenty minutes on foot from the village and carries the Piccadilly line, the Elizabeth line and the Heathrow Express. The walk exists but it is a perimeter walk rather than a pleasant one, and most people take the five minute car ride instead. West Drayton is about thirty five minutes on foot and should be treated purely as a drive.

Elsewhere by road: Terminals 2 and 3 about ten minutes, Colnbrook eight going west, Harmondsworth five going north, and junction 14 of the M25 around ten. A companion coming out from London arrives through Terminal 5 and takes a short ride along the Bath Road, which is why three hours is the shortest booking that makes sense out here.

The night before a dawn departure

Most evenings booked in Longford are the night before an early flight, and they have a particular shape. Dinner early, because the kitchens here stop long before the airport does. Then the hotel, an unhurried few hours, and an alarm that everybody knows about in advance. Nobody pretends the morning is not coming.

That is not a diminished evening, it is simply an honest one. Three hours is the sensible length and the overnight at £1,800 is what people book when the flight is late enough in the morning to make it worth it. The fee is given to your companion in person as she arrives, and it is exactly the figure Etta wrote down before she set out.

Who works this end of the road

Vanessa is the Longford regular, slim at 173 cm, practised at the hours before a dawn departure and genuinely fond of the old street behind the Bath Road. She packs light, reads on planes and understands exactly what this kind of evening is for.

Nearby, Tiffany takes the village at Harmondsworth five minutes north, Milena, Nora and Stacy cover the terminal hotels, and Danielle and Patricia come across from Colnbrook in under ten minutes, which is often the quickest option of all late at night.

Five to ten minutes in every direction

Harmondsworth is five minutes north and has the barn and the churchyard. The terminals are five to ten minutes depending which one you need. Colnbrook is eight minutes west, over the motorway with a hotel belt of its own. West Drayton is a quarter of an hour north and the nearest thing to a town.