The other Valentine's Day

By tomorrow morning Cairo is red in public.

Roses at the traffic lights on the way into work. Red bears stacked outside the pharmacy. The entrance aisle of the supermarket cleared and dressed in cellophane. The gift arrives at an office at eleven so that a floor of people watches it arrive, which is a large part of what it is for.

Nothing about the day here is private.

What the imported calendar does not know is that this market already had a love day before this one. There is a local one in November, with its own flowers and its own greetings, and it was established here before the February version took hold. February arrived later, from outside, and Egypt did not choose between them. It kept both.

Two love days, three months apart, and no attempt to reconcile them.

A plan drawn in London or New York sees one of the two and calls it the season. So November runs with nothing behind it, and February takes the whole budget in the week when every competitor is in the same auction and the wholesale price of anything red has already doubled.

The creative is rarely the thing that failed. The calendar in the file was drawn somewhere else, and nobody asked the people in this city what they already do.

They do a great deal. The occasions here outnumber the rows in any template, and most of them were not designed by a marketing department.

A market that keeps two of something is not asking to be sold to. It is telling you what it already does, and the plan's only job is to be there when it does it.