The terraces reopen

The chairs are back on the pavements.

Every year in the first week of October the cafés of Cairo push their tables out past the doorway, and the city that spent four months indoors with the air conditioning reappears on the street after nine at night. The sixth is two days away, the flags are going up on the kiosks and the mood is already a holiday one, but the chairs did not come out for the flags. They came out because the nights finally cooled.

The outdoor season in this region opens with the temperature, not with a date. Cairo goes first. Riyadh and Dubai follow a few weeks later, when their own evenings become something a person would choose to sit in, and Jeddah later still, because the humidity holds on after the heat has gone. Nobody announces any of it. One week the terrace is empty and the next it is the only place anyone wants to be.

Watch what it does to the numbers. Covers rise. The queue reappears outside the places with a pavement. And delivery softens in the same week, in the same neighbourhoods, because the person who ordered in every night through September is now out in the evening, eating somewhere they can see people. The restaurant that lives on the app sees a dip and reads it as a problem. The restaurant with chairs on the street sees its best month starting.

The media plan for the quarter was written in September, in an office at twenty-two degrees, with a row for every public holiday and every shopping date, and nothing for the week the chairs come out.

The most accurate planning calendar in this region is a thermometer, and no media plan has a column for it.