The weekend that cannot leave

The road west out of Cairo tells you what kind of day off it is.

On a Thursday afternoon in summer it fills, and by evening it is a slow line of cars with the boot packed and the children asleep. On a public holiday that lands in the middle of the week it does almost nothing. The anniversary of 30 June fell on a Tuesday this year, and one day is not enough road. Three hours out, three hours back, a flat by the sea opened and shut again for one night. Nobody does that.

So the family stays, and a Cairo restaurant that has spent every summer week watching its two best days drive to the coast gets one of them back on a weekday.

The demand that walks in is weekend demand. Long tables. Two generations. Children. A lunch that runs to four because nobody has anywhere to be. The people who would have been in a compound by the water are in the city with a free day and no plan, choosing from the same short list they use on a Friday.

What meets them is a Tuesday. The rota was written from the day of the week. The prep list is a weekday prep list. The section is a person light, because somebody took the holiday, which is fair, since it is one. By two o'clock the pass is behind on a day nobody had marked as busy.

Most operators keep a list of the days they close. Very few keep a list of which holidays take the customer out of the city and which ones keep them inside it, and those are two different businesses.

A mid-week holiday is a weekend delivered to the door, and the door was staffed for a Tuesday.