An address with no door

In a Jeddah summer the city moves to the water after eleven at night.

Families take a stretch of grass along the corniche. Mats, a folding table, a thermos, a cool box, the children on a scooter between the light poles, three generations settled in for four hours in air that has finally come down to bearable.

And the delivery riders come to them.

You can stand on that pavement and watch the whole trade arrive. The bike easing along the service road. The phone call. The raised arm from the mat. The bag handed over between two parked cars. The order was placed from the grass, and the address on it is a pin near a car park, a lamp post, the third gate, the bit of kerb past the mosque.

Almost none of it has a door.

I was raised in this city and the pattern is older than the apps. What has changed is that the pattern now has to be written into a field. The addresses a kitchen serves on a June night are a shoreline, a park gate, a corner of a car park, a compound lawn, a rooftop, whichever cousin has the garden this week. The customer has a home address on file and is nowhere near it.

A delivery zone drawn around homes is a map of where the customer sleeps. It gets drawn in a cool month, from a residential density map, by somebody being careful, and it is accurate all year.

In summer the customer is awake somewhere else, on the grass, with a phone, waiting for a bag.