Cairo is open

From Dubai, July is the dead month. The office is a third full, the client is in London, and the regional plan has a grey band across the summer that says nothing happens here.

From Cairo, the same July looks like this. The studio is booked into the evening. A writer is doing a Saudi dialect pass on a script for a September launch in Riyadh, for a client who is away. A crew is shooting a national day film in a warehouse in Sixth of October with the air conditioning losing the argument. The account team is in on a Sunday, because Sunday is a working day here, and the head office on Monday-to-Friday time stopped noticing that years ago.

Nothing stopped in July. The work moved, to where most of it was being made anyway.

For as long as I have been in the industry, the Gulf's autumn has been built in Cairo in the summer. The brands are away. Their launches are being made by people whose summer is a working season, in a city that does not empty so much as thin out towards the coast on a Thursday afternoon and fill again on Sunday morning. One public holiday this week, and then back.

I have sat on both sides of this desk. I have written the grey band from the Gulf, and I have worked the July it describes from Cairo, where it is the busiest month of the year for exactly that reason. The two calendars do not compete. One of them is simply missing from the plan.

A regional plan that marks July as closed was written by someone who only counts the Gulf. The region has always had a working city for every dead month.