Blair

No warm-up, no small talk to be got through: Blair looks at a room once and starts. Romanian and English, both pitched low, and seldom needed after that.

Ten minutes in, most people have stopped talking without noticing they decided to. She works above a street in De Pijp that is never quiet, and takes the hush of a closed room as the first thing to establish. What she calls tantra is a refusal to speed up: one tempo, found early, held to the end. For the first quarter of it she follows the breathing and very little else, and makes no secret of that. Two hours is the booking she asks for, because the middle is the part she is good at and the middle needs room.

Blair decides which bookings she takes and may decline any of them; she sets the limits for what a session includes, says what they are, and may end a visit at any point, as the terms set out.