This love of disinfection must make Cairo unbearable for people like El-Hawary, who yearn for a more sanitised universe. The revolution left jackets on the backs of chairs and then threw chairs through the windows. But this is their moment now, El-Hawary’s and his ilk, and maybe that is why they are building a new capital out in the eastern desert, plunging billions into wide, tidy boulevards and neatly segregated business zones while bread riots play out in the old cities left behind. I’ve been to the construction site, a sprawling area just south of Madinat Badr, and paced across the helipads and the hotel complexes and the ceremonial mound from which Sisi will one day inaugurate the future Cairo, which is bleak and sandy and wrapped in a frayed tarpaulin. The regime believes in a binary choice, between total chaos and total control, and if current Cairo was the former then this new capital will be the anti-Cairo: purged of its itinerant shrimp sellers and its outdoor mattress stitchers and its pairs of lovers holding clandestine hands while crouched in the scummy, piss-stained underbelly of the 15 May Bridge. There will be no place in the new capital for white bed sheets strung up between lamp posts by rebellious teenagers and pressed into use as makeshift cinema screens, projectors powered by hacked electricity boxes to broadcast illicit footage of army atrocities to the streets. There will be no audience for the bed sheets, because the new capital will be the antithesis of density and anyway the lamp posts will be too far apart. I spoke to an engineer out there who told me that the state’s synthetic new home will boast the second biggest dancing fountain in the world, and I didn’t know what to say. Afterwards, I met a group of dust-streaked labourers who were helping to build a wall which will eventually encircle the whole city, insulating it and its inhabitants – the first of whom will be Egypt’s government ministries – from all those jackets on chairs and spilt coffee grounds; from the smoking and the beards and the rest of recent history’s unpalatable debris. An urban planning expert described the new capital to me as a bad version of The Truman Show, but up close it looked more confused and menacing than that, more like an attempt to draw a line under an unfinished story, but one that just falls short. The section of the wall that the labourers were working on reminded me of a medieval fortress, massive and unyielding. One of them unzipped his trousers and urinated on it. ‘This town is for the happy people, the ones who fly above us,’ he said.