Last weekends rain cleared the air giving us sea views from every window in the apartment. The thin blue line on the horizon is the ‘sea view’ so we are really talking in estate agent language here.

I managed to persuade the caretaker, Abdelrahman, to take me up onto the roof of the building to take some photographs.

As I write this, just a few days later, we are in the middle of a small scale sand storm. The window sills are slowly filling with dust and none of the city skyscrapers are visible.