Lunch has two weeks left

Ramadan is expected to begin around the eighteenth of this month, depending on the sighting. Which means the daytime has about two weeks left.

Count what the daytime actually owns here. The lunch terrace in Riyadh at one o'clock in February, in the only weather of the year that makes a terrace worth building. The coffee bought on the way into the office. The gym at six. The bakery on the school run, in the twenty minutes when a mother is already stopped at a kerb. The Cairo cafe that fills from two until four with people who order one thing and stay for three hours.

Then the month arrives and every one of those hours goes quiet. Not weak, quiet. Thirty days of a dead morning and an early close, and by the time the daytime comes back the heat is on its way, and a Riyadh terrace has a few weeks left before it closes until October.

So this fortnight is not the approach to a season. It is the season, the daytime's whole year, and it does not have a name in any plan I have seen.

That is because of what everybody is doing with it. Every meeting in this fortnight is a Ramadan meeting. The film is in review, the media is being confirmed, the set menu is at the printer, and the two weeks the work is being done in are treated as the corridor rather than the room. Nothing is bought for them. Nothing is read on them afterwards, because February gets read in April as the base under a bigger month.

The daytime economy is spending the best fortnight of its year rehearsing for a month that does not want the daytime at all.