Rebecca Hughes

Feature: Rent London's lady of the night for £6.50 an hour

With talk of tuition fees rising to £9,000, some students are going to have to turn to new ways of making money. So, the Newswire’s Rebecca Hughes decided to rent herself from as little £6.50 an hour to pay the bills.

My friends have lovingly nicknamed me a ‘lady of the night’ and now as I’m standing on the corner of a quiet street in London, I think they might be right.

However, I’m not a prostitute; I’m a rentable friend. They say money can’t buy you love, but apparently these days it can buy you friends.

I admit, I signed up with visions of going hot air ballooning with Robert Downey Jr-esque men, but instead I am faced with a man in his early thirties, recently divorced, looking like he’s in the middle of the breakdown. I smile awkwardly at him. What do I do? He’s a friend, so I can’t shake his hand, but then I don’t actually know him, so I can’t hug him either. It was the start of one awkward night.

Rent a Friend, a database of people who can be hired "to hang out with, go to a movie or restaurant with", or be "someone to show you around an unfamiliar town", is beginning to spread from the US and Japan to the UK. It’s a strictly platonic site in the words of the owner, Scott Rosenbaum. And aren’t I glad.

My friend appears to be sweating nervously from across the table. It feels like a blind date gone horribly wrong, or like you’ve been forced to work with that boy in school who unknowingly has a line of constant drool dripping out of his train-tracked mouth. But then I remember that I am being paid, and for a while it makes me feel even worse. Surely this guy has a real friend to rant about his ex-wife to, right?

The conversation is awkward and fragmented much of the time. I would listen, like a good friend should, but he’s clearly not a talker. Perhaps behind his screen when he signed up he thought it was a good idea, but now sitting across from me it seems that we are both regretting it.

Maybe the problem was coffee. We were plunged into a situation of conversation, which neither of us were ready for on our first friend trip. Perhaps if we had instead been climbing a rock wall, or attempting martial arts, we could have laughed in our common failure. Instead, we eventually just looked at each other, nodded goodbyes, and shuffled away awkwardly into the night. I felt a pang of guilt as he moved towards the emptiness and isolation of his one-bedded flat. The guilt only increased further when I noticed my bank balance had done so too.

Policing magazine is costing taxpayers over £65,000

Kent taxpayers are paying over £65,000 for a police produced magazine, a Freedom of Information request has revealed.

Kent Police Authority produces 13 individual magazines for each district once a year. The total cost of printing these magazines was £36,936.00, whilst the distribution cost came to £29,207.83, bringing the total cost to £66,143,83.

The figure for the Policing Kent Magazine emerged only weeks after Kent Police announced the need to make £50m worth of government-ordered cuts. The magazine is equivalent to roughly three yearly salaries of newly appointed Kent constables.

Strood resident, Andrew Day, said: “I'm generally not in favour of massaging public perceptions of a service. There is too much time and money spent on PR and communications in my opinion.”

Another resident, Nicky Bates, Rochester, said: “I have to be honest, my copy usually ends up in the recycling after a quick browse.”

However, the Chief Executive, Mark Gilmartin, defended the magazine saying: "As of 1 April 2006 a legal requirement was placed on all Police Authorities to produce local policing summaries… Kent Police Authority decided that in order to best reflect local policing areas we would produce 13 individual magazines to reflect each of the districts.”

He added: “We consider our publications to be value for money and the cost to each police council tax household is a small amount, within the region of 11p.”

The authority claims that it is the cheapest way to publish and deliver the information. However, one local printer who didn’t want to be named, said: “There are far cheaper options than printing a full colour glossy magazine, including the option to print some pages in black and white, which would reduce the cost at a time when cuts are needed.”

Kent Police Authority was unable to comment at the time of publishing.

Secret Suppers

Standing on the street everything looks completely normal as guests arrive for a dinner party at a house near Tunbridge Wells. However, on the inside it is not your typical dinner party. In fact it’s illegal. Some call them supper clubs, others underground restaurants, but essentially you’re secretly dining in someone else’s home and paying for it.

Hari Covert opened the first one in Kent and since then they’ve grown in popularity across the region. “It was really done as a bit of a two fingers up to somebody else to prove to them that using Facebook and Twitter was the way forward in terms of marketing their business.”

Within three days of the website going live Hari had his first booking and since then his popularity has soared. He puts this success down to the use of social media. He said: “It has been phenomenal. Twitter in particular, I’ve got now, I think over 500-odd followers in a little over a year. I look for nearby tweets from people and then start following those people and then because of the etiquette of Twitter they start following you back and start getting a little bit curious. Their curiosity gets the better of them and they start thinking well who is Hari Covert?”

However, he doesn’t believe that he can keep his identity secret forever and that eventually someone will “grass him up” to the council, but he remains determined to continue regardless of council intervention. He added: “Life is too short to worry about it. I would stop doing it here in my own home and I would find other venues for it.”

“The whole aspect of it being illegal, yeah it’s all a bit of fun, and I love it. I do like that sort of on the edge idea.”

To keep his identity secret Hari uses a pseudonym name and most never learn his real name. Originally his neighbours didn’t even know about the restaurant.

“One of my neighbours found out through having read an article in a BBC Good Food magazine about the underground restaurant movement. They thought it sounded interesting and they searched underground restaurants in Kent on Google. They found my website and were looking at the pictures and thought ‘I recognise that’ and then I get this email from them saying do you do takeaways through the hedge? That was highly amusing from our point of view. They had no idea that we had a restaurant; they just thought we had regular dinner parties.”

Since Hari’s restaurant more have opened in Kent and Bromley is now home to the only gluten-free underground restaurant, Annie’s Supper Club.

The owner, Annie, opened the restaurant due to the lack of choice available for people who need gluten-free diets. She has been cooking such food for her family for four years after two of her four children were diagnosed as autistic. Her father was then diagnosed as having Celiac disease and died as a result of a late diagnosis. Following that the whole family got tested and they discovered that her brother and another of her children were also carrying the disease.

“I realised how impossible it was to go anywhere gluten free. We just couldn’t go out as a family to eat. And a lot of friends had been saying you really ought to have a restaurant. The two ideas kind of merged and by random chance I saw someone talking about an underground restaurant on the internet and I thought that’s something I could do. So we decided to set up Annie’s and twice a month we have a dinner and all of our food is 100% gluten free.”

However, Annie doesn’t believe that what she’s doing is illegal. “It’s not that we’re operating against law, we’re operating where there isn’t a law and taking advantage of what’s not there. We’re not selling food, we ask for a donation at the end of the meal towards the food they’ve enjoyed. So it’s sort of a step up from having a dinner party. It’s like having a bunch of friends round but asking them to pay for the meal.” 

Albeit, the Food Standards Agency said such businesses would likely be classed as a food business. Bradley Smythe of the agency said: “If it is a food business, the activity will come under the food hygiene legislation and will need to be registered with the local authority.”

Locate an underground restaurant near you using our interactive map below:

View Underground Restaurants in a larger map

An under-age boy has been able to buy fireworks in D&A Toys in Chatham.

In an investigation by the Centre for Journalism’s Newswire, two 17-year olds went in search of fireworks, despite the legal age for buying them being 18.

Sam Bell found that the toyshop didn’t even question his age and happily sold rockets to him.

At the store where he bought them, the cabinet where the fireworks are kept had a poster stuck to it that reads: “It is illegal to sell adult fireworks to anyone under the age of 18.”

When the Newswire confronted the sales assistant about the illegal sale, she replied: “‘Was he under 18? Sorry. It was just because he really did look quite old. I usually do it all the time.”

The store thanked the Newswire for highlighting the problem and said they would check in future.

Only last week the Trading Standards Team in Chatham warned that fines of up to £5,000 would be handed out to anyone caught not abiding by the law.

Listen to the podcast below for more on the story: