Amsterdam body to body massage, and the formats that sit beside it

Read the list against the thermometer. In a mild week every format on it behaves the same way. In the second half of January, or across four days of August when the canal smells of warm stone, some of them get noticeably easier and others get noticeably harder, and the reason is physical rather than a matter of taste.

What the season asks of the room

Oil work needs almost nothing built: a bed, air that is not cold, and towels she carries with her. That is why body to body and plain oil work are the two bookings that hold up in a badly heated canal house in February. There is no surface to lay out, no gel to bring up to temperature, no reliance on a shower you have not looked inside.

Gel and foam raise the stakes in the cold. Nuru gel that has gone cool is unpleasant on skin and takes real time to warm, and a rinse afterwards depends on hot water reaching a top floor bathroom at eleven at night. Soapy begins in the bathroom altogether, so a tiled room with a small radiator sets the tone before anything else does. Neither format is a poor idea in winter. Both are better ideas in May, and both are better again at ninety minutes rather than sixty, so the warming and the rinse are not rushed.

A hot week turns the advice over

Four or five nights a summer the city refuses to cool down after dark, and a room without air conditioning becomes the problem to solve rather than the shelter. Full contact work is warm work by nature, so a heatwave booking runs better with the window open early, the curtains shut against the afternoon and a lighter oil used sparingly. Soapy is the one format the heat actually improves, because it starts wet and ends in water.

Wind, rain and the evening you decided to stay in

A storm off the water does not delay anyone. Arrival runs forty to sixty minutes anywhere central once the hour is agreed, in horizontal rain as in still air, and a room at a Schiphol airport hotel is arranged on its own with the length of the drive agreed before the hour is held. What rain does change is the first five minutes: a wet coat needs somewhere to go, and a therapist who has crossed the city in it is better for a few minutes of warmth before anything begins.

Length, and what a cold room does to it

Sixty minutes is a whole session in an oil format and a tight one in a gel format. Ninety is where a cold night settles, because the first quarter of an hour goes on getting warm and that time has to come from somewhere. Two hours and three are the single hour multiplied out, with nothing added for staying on. Two therapists on one guest run at double the hour, a couple sharing one therapist at that same double, and a couple taking a therapist each at four times it. The eight hour block is a fixed sum for one guest, which is the booking most often written in the dark months by people who worked out at midnight that the morning was already lost.

If the weather is the only thing deciding

Cold, and the heating is slow. Ninety minutes of body to body or oil work, with the room brought up to temperature an hour before.

Soaked through and cross about it. Ninety minutes, oil, nothing to set up, and a hot shower kept for afterwards rather than before.

Hot and airless. Sixty or ninety minutes of soapy, or lighter oil work with the window open and the fan on.

A long grey stretch with nowhere to be. Three hours, or the eight hour block, which is what February weekends are for.

If none of that decides it, ninety minutes of body to body is the booking that fits any month of the year. The questions page takes the rest, and the booking page says what to write first.