Angelika, the jazz-night outcall escort from Centrum

Half past ten on a Thursday, and the last set at a jazz bar near the Nieuwmarkt is still ringing in Angelika's ears as her taxi swings out onto the Prins Hendrikkade. Streetlights pour down the windscreen in long gold ribbons. She fixes her lipstick in the driver's mirror, counts the bridges under her breath and sends a two-word message: nearly there. Then a lift, a carpeted corridor, and a knock with a drummer's timing.

What comes through your door is 172 cm of tennis-court posture: twenty-four, athletic, black hair running long and straight down her back, brown eyes that take in the whole room at a glance. The sport has given her a light, springy stride and a competitor's grin that appears whenever a conversation turns into a friendly contest. Her wardrobe speaks relaxed Mediterranean glamour, warm colours and easy lines that belong on a sunlit terrace yet somehow look even better under a hotel lamp at midnight.

Confidence arrives first, playfulness half a step behind, and elegance keeps the two in step. Mention contemporary art and you get a real opinion, never a polite nod; she prefers the canvas that starts an argument over the one that matches the sofa. Mention jazz and she will name the trumpet solo she would cross the city at three in the morning to hear again. Her English is quick and teasing, and she knows exactly when to let a silence play out like a slow ballad.

The car usually collects her in Amsterdam Centrum, so the canal belt and the hotels around Dam are only a few turns of the wheel away. Anyone hoping for a proper rally of sporting banter could also look at Milena, a tennis devotee who rides in from the Jordaan. For Angelika, though, the best moment of the night never changes: brake lights, engine off, a quick glance up at your lit window, and the evening finally starting.