The day starts at nine

By the middle of May the street here is empty at three in the afternoon and busy at eleven at night, and it stays that way until September.

The heat does this every year and everybody who lives with it knows it. The plan often does not, because the plan was built on a template where the day runs from breakfast to about eight in the evening and the evening is for winding down.

So the schedule wakes up at seven in the morning, works hardest through the afternoon, and starts stepping down at nine, at the exact hour the customer starts moving. Coffee is at eleven. The family goes out at ten. The kitchen turns its busiest tables at half past ten and takes a last order well after midnight. By the time the phone is in the hand of somebody with an hour to spare, most of the day's budget has already gone.

I do not read this as laziness. The default was written somewhere else, and defaults travel further than anybody intends them to. The hourly curve sitting inside most planning tools was drawn for a European working day, where the afternoon is the productive part and the night is thin. Nobody rewrote it for a city where the afternoon is something to be survived indoors.

Summer here is not a fall in demand. It is a move in the clock.

The same household eats out, orders, browses and buys. Later. Revenue does not leave the market, it leaves the afternoon, and it turns up again after dark with the same riyals in it.

The plans that hold through a Gulf summer are the ones that moved with the clock. The ones that held to the calendar report a soft season and call it the weather.