Violetta, elegant company in Oud-Zuid

The first impression is all cool distance, and it survives roughly until the first joke. Violetta is 30, 178 centimetres, tall and slender, with long sleek black hair and dark brown eyes, and a sleek desert gold glamour that makes her look like somebody who does not laugh easily. She laughs constantly. The gap between those two facts is the most enjoyable part of an evening with her.

Stand-up comedy is the reason, followed properly rather than casually, and she will drag anybody willing to a basement show on a weeknight. Stacy is her usual accomplice. Bookshops are the quieter habit, the secondhand ones, where she buys more than any sensible person could carry back, and Patricia has exactly the same problem. Swimming keeps her in the shape that being that tall requires, several times a week, unglamorously and early. It also explains the calm; people who spend time doing lengths tend to be difficult to rattle, and very little about a delayed flight or a rearranged plan appears to trouble her in the slightest. Tell her the evening has moved by two hours and she will simply ask where to.

Oud-Zuid is home, a few streets from the museum quarter hotels and an easy ride out to the airport. In English she is dry and exact. Mysterious is the word people use before they meet her and almost nobody uses afterwards, which suits her perfectly. Violetta suits a long dinner, a show afterwards, and a guest who enjoys being surprised by the person sitting opposite him. At 30 she has stopped performing the version of herself that people expect from the photographs, and the real one is considerably better company.

First a long dinner, then a basement somewhere with a microphone in it. Violetta follows stand-up properly rather than casually and will happily drag a willing traveller to a weeknight show that half the audience has never heard of.

The evening is funnier than the photographs suggest. From the far side of a room she gives the impression of being hard to amuse, and then the first joke lands and that theory collapses entirely. If the night shifts by a couple of hours, the only question you get back is where to, because swimming early and unglamorously several times a week has made her very difficult to rattle. If there is an afternoon spare, a secondhand bookshop, and more books than she can reasonably carry back.