Where Cairo spent Eid

Eid al-Adha came at the end of last week, around the twenty-seventh depending on the country and the sighting, and Cairo went home.

Not home to Maadi or Heliopolis. Home to the family house: the village in the Delta, the town in Upper Egypt, the grandmother whose address the whole family still counts from. That is where the sacrifice is done and where the meat is divided in the morning, a share for the household, a share for the relatives, a share for the neighbours who have less, apportioned by people who have done it the same way for as long as anyone can remember.

So for a week the capital's income is not spent in the capital.

It is spent in Tanta and Sohag and a hundred towns no media plan can name. On the butcher. On the sweets, the fabric and the toys brought down from the city. On the grocer at the end of the lane who stocked up in advance, because he has watched this week arrive every year of his life and knows it does not come twice. Those governorates sit in the plan as secondary and are weighted accordingly, and for seven days they carry the most emotional spending of the Egyptian year.

The Cairo dashboard cannot see any of it. It sees traffic falling, a quiet week, a soft month, and that is what it reports.

The distributor sees the week that actually happened. The van goes out twice before the holiday, he knows which lines come back on it and which do not, and by the middle of this week he can tell you whether the country had a good Eid.

In Egypt the honest Eid number is a sell-out figure from a town the marketing team has never visited.