The occasion under the offers

Almost every occasion in our calendar now arrives with a set of offers attached. The feast has its boxes of sweets, the mothers' day has its gift sets, the new school year has its bundles. By the time the day comes, it can feel as if buying was the point.

It was not. Strip the offers away and most of these occasions began as something simpler: a reason to bring people to the same table, including people who would not otherwise sit together.

In a building in Nasr City there is a family from Syria on the third floor and a family from Sudan on the fifth. They have lived there for a while. Most of the Egyptian families on the stairs nod to them and little more. Nobody is unkind. Nobody has had a reason to knock.

An occasion is that reason. It gives a neighbour permission to carry a plate up two flights and stay for tea, to ask where the children were born, to learn what the other family does on its own holidays. That is the version worth keeping, and it costs almost nothing.

The offers will keep coming, and some of them are useful. But the better meaning is not going to defend itself. Each occasion hands us the chance to make it real again.

And the plate can go up the stairs on an ordinary Tuesday too. The calendar is only a reminder.