Whether you reserve a week around a fixed date or around a person changes what we ask next

You have told us that somebody else's calendar decides. This page asks which somebody. Reserve a week around a fixed date and the calendar leads while the ground follows behind it. Answer with a person instead and it runs the other way round, because the ground is settled first and the dates come after.

Why we ask this before the ground or the money

Every constraint sounds the same when you say it out loud. None of them behave the same. A date is a point. It closes one week and leaves every other decision open, so the work runs outward from those seven or eight days: what is happening in that place while you are in it, and who else wants the same rooms on the same nights. A person is a condition. It applies to every hour of the week and to every mile of ground between one bed and the next, and the calendar underneath is often still yours to move.

We put the question second because the answer decides which of the later questions are worth your time. Ask somebody how long a day on foot they want when the immovable thing is a wedding in a hill town, and you have learned nothing that changes the shortlist. Ask about high season when the immovable thing is a knee, and the same. Sixteen weeks sit behind this fork, eight behind each answer, four behind each answer to the question after it.

If the fixed thing is a date

Say a date and the next question is whether it falls inside the local high season, because that one fact decides how the week has to be put together. Inside those weeks the rooms in the town itself are spoken for a long way out, sometimes before the date is even published, and what we can do comes down to who picks up the telephone in February. Outside them the town is the same town, the rooms are the same rooms, and a fortnight of notice is usually enough. Several of those weeks carry our own number at one or two, which is our way of saying you could put most of it together yourself in an evening, and that page says so in its first line rather than in a footnote.

People who come through this door tend to arrive with one line of certainty and six blanks. They know the date to the day, the party to within two, and they have already reserved their own flights around it. That order is the right way round. Tell us the date first and we will not spend a question on it.

If the fixed thing is a person

Say a person and the next question is about the length of a day on foot, because the rest hangs off it: how far apart the beds are allowed to sit, whether a car has to be part of the week, how much of the ground between the two is flat, and what happens at four in the afternoon when the interest runs out before the walking does. We ask it in plain terms and we want plain answers. How many hours. How many stairs, and whether there is a rail beside them. Whether the answer is the same on the second morning as it was on the first.

Nobody needs to apologize for the person, and readers do it anyway. Tell us about the knee, the lung, the two year old, the father who will not say when he is tired, and you have handed us something a week can be built on. Weeks built that way look unremarkable written down and hold up in the parts that matter: one bed for the week, one flat river, one bench standing where somebody is going to want to sit.