Appointments by arrangement, in north London. The subject of this site is the arrangement and the record: how an hour is asked for, offered, confirmed, changed and written down.
Office
N17 8HF, London
Company
No. 17408210
Incorporated
19 August 2026
An appointment, and the line that follows it
An appointment at this practice is a booking of time at a place: a day, a start time, a length in minutes, and a room at the address at the foot of this page. That is the whole of what is arranged, and it is the whole of what this site describes.
Two things exist for every booking. The first is the arrangement — what the office and the person booking have settled between them, in writing, before the day arrives. The second is the record — the line the office enters once the arrangement is settled, or changed, or let go. The arrangement is an agreement about an hour. The record is a dated note that the agreement was made.
Each spread below faces the two: agreed on the left, written down on the right. Lower down, an arrangement sheet works out what a day of a given shape can hold.
Four stages, four entries
Every booking passes the same four stages in the same order, and each puts one dated line in the file.
Each block of agreement on the left produces one ruled entry on the right. The fold between them is where this office works.
01The enquiry
Agreed
An enquiry reaches the office in writing, at the address at the foot of this page. It names the days of the week the writer can attend and the earliest and latest hour on those days.
The office replies to the address the enquiry came from, and to no other. If none of the hours given overlap the frame the diary is kept to, the office says so plainly and the enquiry ends there.
Written down
the date the enquiry arrived
the days and hours the writer gave
the days the office offered in reply
whether the enquiry closed without a booking
02The offer and the confirmation
Agreed
One day and one start time are offered at a time. An offer holds for three working days; after that the hour goes back into the diary without further notice.
A booking exists when the office has sent a confirmation naming the date, the start time, the length in minutes, the address and the notice period in hours. Until that message has been sent, nothing is booked.
Written down
the date and start time confirmed
the length in minutes
the address and the room
the notice period that applies to it
the date the confirmation was sent
03The hour itself
Agreed
The hour is held. Between the start time and the end time the room is not offered to anyone else, whether or not the hour is used.
Arriving after the start time shortens the hour. It does not move the end of it, because the hour that follows may already be held by someone else.
Written down
whether the hour was used
the time it began and the time it ended
that the hour was held and not used, where that is what happened
04A change, or notice
Agreed
A booking can be moved or let go. Notice is counted in hours before the start time, and the number of hours is named in the confirmation.
A new date may be asked for in the same message. It becomes a booking when the office confirms it, not when it is asked for — so a move is always two entries and never an amendment to one.
Written down
the date and the hour notice arrived
the address it arrived from
whether it fell inside the period
the booking let go, and the fresh entry that replaced it
The frame the diary is kept to
The office keeps one frame and offers no hour outside it. The frame is the outer limit of what can be arranged, not a list of free hours: an hour is free only until it is confirmed to somebody. The counts below follow from the frame by the arithmetic the arrangement sheet performs.
Minutes in the frame, and whole slots at a fifty-minute session with a ten-minute gap.
Day
Frame
Minutes
Slots
Left over
Monday
09:00 – 17:30
510
8
30 min
Tuesday
09:00 – 17:30
510
8
30 min
Wednesday
13:00 – 19:00
360
6
0 min
Thursday
09:00 – 17:30
510
8
30 min
Friday
09:00 – 15:00
360
6
0 min
Saturday
10:00 – 13:00
180
3
0 min
Sunday is not in the frame. The thirty leftover minutes on a long day are shorter than a session and hold nothing.
The same frame drawn against the clock, ruled into sixty-minute slots.
The arrangement sheet
Set a session length, a gap, the earliest and latest times the practice accepts and a weekday, and the sheet works out what a day of that shape can hold. The working is printed line by line so it can be checked against the frame above.
The four lines a file can hold
A file is a short thing. It holds the arrangement and the dates on which the arrangement changed, and it holds nothing else at all.
Notice, counted in hours
Notice is not counted in days, because a day is not a moment and an appointment begins at a moment. A notice period of twenty-four hours against a start time of eleven in the morning closes at eleven in the morning on the day before, not at midnight.
The number of hours is named in the confirmation and does not change afterwards. On the changes page a second sheet performs that subtraction against a date and a start time, and prints how long is left from the moment the page is open. Late notice is recorded as late notice, with the hour it arrived, and the office answers it either way.