In March 2020, the world stopped. Not gradually, not politely - it simply stopped. Borders closed, offices emptied, flights were grounded, and several billion people found themselves alone with their thoughts in ways they had not anticipated and could not entirely manage.

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I was one of them. Living in Dubai, watching a city that never sleeps suddenly go very still. Dubai is many things -relentless, ambitious, performative, magnificent - but quiet is not one of them. Or was not, until it was. The silence that descended in those first weeks was not peaceful. It was disorientating. A city built on movement, transaction, and the perpetual arrival of people from somewhere else who suddenly had nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait.

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In that waiting, something unexpected happened.

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People started being extraordinarily human. A neighbour who had lived three floors above me for two years knocked on the door to ask if I needed anything from the supermarket. Strangers in locked-down apartment buildings started leaving food outside each other’s doors. Conversations happened across balconies between people who had shared views of the Burj Khalifa for years without once sharing a sentence. The city that had always been too busy to notice itself suddenly had nothing to do but notice.

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I watched all of it. Which, as this website probably makes clear by now, is something of a professional habit.

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But this time, watching was not enough. The lockdown produced a specific quality of human moment - fragile, occasionally funny, often quietly heroic - that felt imperative to record before the world got noisy again and everyone remembered they were too busy for this kind of thing. Because the world always gets noisy again. And when it does, it forgets what it learned when it was quiet.

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So I wrote it down. Not as journalism, not as memoir, not as a document of suffering - there was enough of that being written elsewhere, by people better qualified to write it. I wrote it as fiction, because fiction has a particular access to emotional truth that reportage does not.

 

The stories in Stillness In The Air are invented. The experiences that produced them are entirely real.

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The collection spans cultures, cities, and circumstances - because the lockdown was not one experience but several billion simultaneous and entirely different ones, held together by the single shared fact that nobody knew what was going to happen next.

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Stillness In The Air was published in English in 2023. Respire, Résiste, Réinvente - the French edition - followed in 2024, because some truths travel better in a second language, and because a story about stillness deserved to exist in the language of Camus, who understood stillness and its discontent better than most.

 

Both editions are available on Amazon.

Stillness In The Air -Kindle, Paperback, Hardcover

Respire, Résiste, Réinvente - Kindle, Paperback, Hardcover

 

The world has got noisy again. But the stories remain. So does the stillness, if you know where to look.