Four properties and no others
A session is a booking of time at a place. It has a date, a start time, a length in minutes, and a room at the registered office. Those four are the whole of it. This page describes them, and so does the file; neither describes anything that happens inside the room.
The length is settled before the first booking and holds for each one after it. Changing the length is changing the booking rather than amending it: the end time moves, the hour after it may already be held by somebody else, and so the old entry is let go and a fresh one is confirmed.
The start time is a moment
The room is held from the start time to the end time and is offered to nobody else between them, whether or not the hour is used. That is what is being booked.
Arriving after the start time shortens the hour from the front. The end time does not move, because the next hour may already belong to somebody, and moving one ending moves every ending after it. An hour that began nine minutes late is entered as having begun nine minutes late, with both times, and that is the end of the matter.
Where the office cannot hold an hour it has confirmed, it writes as early as it can to the address on the file, names a replacement date if one is free, and enters both the hour released and the fact that the office released it. An hour the office cannot hold is never counted as notice from the person who booked it.
The hour, as agreed and as entered
AThe day itself
Agreed
The room is held between the two times named in the confirmation. Nothing about the arrangement is settled on the day: the day performs what was agreed in advance.
A companion may wait at the address where that was arranged beforehand and written into the confirmation. It is not arranged on the doorstep, because the office would have nothing written to act on.
Written down
- that the hour was used, or held and not used
- the time it began and the time it ended
- nothing about the room beyond which room it was
What the arrangement covers
- the room, from the start time to the end time, offered to nobody else
- one written confirmation naming all six items
- one notice period, in hours, fixed when the booking is confirmed and unchanged after
- one dated line in the file afterwards
It does not cover time outside the agreed length, a second person in the room where that was not arranged in advance, or a change made by telephone. A change made by telephone is not refused out of awkwardness: the office cannot enter it, and an arrangement that is not entered is one the diary will contradict a week later.
More than one date
Where several dates are wanted, each one is a separate booking with its own entry and its own notice period. A message asking for six Tuesdays produces six confirmations and six lines, and letting one of them go leaves the other five exactly as they were.
That is more messages than a single standing arrangement would need, and it is deliberate. A standing arrangement has no date, so it cannot be held, released or counted — and when a question arises about one Tuesday in March there would be nothing in the file to answer it with.