Field notes, the wedding hall

The halls are booked out and quoting a premium for a Thursday.

Ramadan is expected around the middle of February, and weddings are not held during the fasting month, so the weeks before it are the busiest wedding weeks of the Gulf year.

You can see the whole season without any data at all. The hotel ballrooms run two functions in a night, with a queue of valet at both ends. The bridal shops work past midnight on alterations. The jewellers have their good stock in the window. The photographers and the videographers turn work away. The caterers hire anyone who has done a service before. The florists buy forward. The car hire places have the long white ones out on the forecourt.

None of it appears in the regional calendars, which call January a post-peak quiet period and phase the year accordingly.

The categories that live off these weeks know it, and most of them advertise almost nothing, because the bookings arrive from a cousin who used them in October and a sister who saw the room in person.

A season with no line in the media calendar is not a small season. It is a season whose customers have already set the date.