Conference season begins in September

The autumn business season has hard boundaries at both ends. Nothing of consequence happens before the first week of September because half the country is away, and nothing happens after the last week of November because December belongs to something else entirely. Everything in between is compressed into that window.

The autumn is short because it is bounded by the summer at one end and December at the other, and every organisation that wants to hold an event has worked that out. The result is a very dense calendar with a great many events competing for the same dates.

For ground transport that means availability is genuinely constrained in a way it is not in the spring, particularly in the cities that host the larger conferences.

The season begins in one kind of weather and ends in another, and the change happens in the middle without any particular day marking it. Evening collections that were done in daylight in September are done in the dark and the rain by the middle of November.

September work is late summer work and November work is winter work, and the transition happens somewhere in the middle without anybody noticing. Evening collections get darker, forecourts get wetter, and the umbrella comes back into daily use.

It is the season when the small comforts start to matter again: a warmed cabin, a short walk, and a car that is where it said it would be.