The night I had my own ‘Pretty Woman’ moment
‘We’ve all got to work, haven’t we?” the general manager of the hotel smiled down at me. “And because we’ve all got to work, I know you’ll understand why I’m going to have to move you along.”
It took longer than it should have for the penny to drop. Maybe because I was 20. Maybe because I was so excited about the jazz drummer I’d arranged to meet in the hotel bar near my Cambridge college that I’d necked my Malibu and Coke in 0-60 seconds. But also, I guess, because it had never occurred to me that I could be mistaken for a prostitute. Yes, the skirt was short and the boots were high, but weren’t everyone’s? In retrospect I wasn’t offended enough. Maybe I was just too busy calming down my date to think about how outrageous that breezy-faced middle management moron’s presumptions were. And the date was seething, seeing it as an affront not just to me but him. Which is exactly how Julian Lloyd Webber must feel. The musician has declared war on London’s illegal brothels after his wife, acclaimed cellist Jiaxin Cheng, was mistaken for a sex worker yards from their home in South Kensington. “The problem is well known around the area, put it that way,” he said on Sunday. “What annoys me is that many shops work so hard to try to pay very high rents through legitimate means, and then you have other kinds of shops getting away with you-know-what.”
According to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s younger brother, the you-know-what is mainly taking place in spurious Kensington “health centres” and “spas” – of which there are many. I should know, I live nearby. And when I called my regular (bone fide) spa to ask whether they had noticed an increasing problem with male clients requesting various “addons” to the services listed on their website, the manager sighed. “At least once a week we’ll get a call from a wellspoken man wanting a detailed description of ‘what kind’ of massages we provide. They never have the guts to ask outright. Which is why I take great pleasure in saying, ‘I’m afraid we don’t have sex with our clients here, sir’, and slamming the phone down.”