The desert weekend

The biggest consumer occasion of the month in Saudi Arabia is not in any calendar I have been handed.

Every winter weekend a share of the city drives out. No date, no ticket, no licence, no organiser. A car is loaded on Thursday afternoon, a family or a group of friends sits out in the desert until late, and the same thing happens the following week, for as long as the weather holds.

Watch what moves with them. Coffee bought to go, in quantity, on a Thursday afternoon rather than a Friday morning. Meat by the kilo. Charcoal. Folding chairs, a carpet, a lamp, ice. A full tank and a tyre check. A supermarket run that looks nothing like the weekly shop, because it is a list for one night outdoors.

A coffee place on the right road out of Riyadh can do a Friday's trade on a Thursday for three months of the year. Ask the manager why and the answer is not a marketing answer. People are on their way out of the city.

Which is the useful question about that coffee. It is not being bought as a drink. It has been hired to start the trip, which is why the order is large, it is for four people, it is at four in the afternoon, and nobody sits down in the shop to drink it.

None of this is in the regional plan. The plan has a first quarter, a soft January and a build towards Ramadan. There is no row in the template for a season made of ordinary weekends and good weather, no peg to book against, nothing to sponsor, and nobody to buy it from.

So the plan cannot see it, and the customer could not miss it.