"The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful), the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed."
This was the formula of Ernest Hemingway, my favourite fiction writer, for successful literary endeavour during his days as an up-and-coming novelist in Paris in the 1920s. He wrote about it in A Moveable Feast, a book of short stories.
These days you could probably do away with the pencils and the pocket knife, but would have to add a laptop and good broadband connection. The Dôme Cafe in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) has it all. I like to think of the Dôme as "my" cafe in Dubai's financial hub. I've been using it as my office for the past three years, and it hasn't let me down.
The location is ideal: next door to Rothschild, over the way from Deutsche Bank and Shuaa, and within striking distance of all the big banks and institutions that have set up in the DIFC.
With good service (thank you, Jennifer, for bending the rules on breakfast-serving hours for me), it has everything. I can even leave all my gear there to attend a meeting with no fear it will be stolen or removed.
And now, apparently, others agree. In the past couple of months, I've noticed a steady flow of journalists and business people who use the Dôme as I do: set up camp in the morning and work through until evening.
In his short story Birth of a New School, Hemingway described how interlopers at his favourite Paris cafe, the Closerie des Lilas, annoyed him so much he would tell them, in language that could not be repeated here, to leave him alone and quit his place of work.
That's a little excessive, in my view. The more the merrier at the Dôme DIFC. If it turns into a little collective of business journalists there, all well and good. I too sense the birth of a new school.
Still on the literary theme, congratulations are due to Mustafa Alrawi, an old friend of mine and one of the first people I met on arrival in the UAE nearly six years ago.
Mustafa has managed something I never did, despite a couple of attempts and a stack of notes lingering somewhere in storage: he's written a novel and it is about to be published. An achievement indeed.
Creating Rachel will be published at the end of next month by Quartet, and is already available for pre-order on Amazon.
Mustafa, who has been an accountant, journalist, media mogul and (now) public relations executive, tells me the plot involves a 20-something Muslim living in Britain in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in 2001, and his love affair with a beautiful young Jewish woman.
"Of course there's often an element of autobiography in fiction, but in this case there was also an influence from The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis, one of my favourite novels," says Mustafa.
I will not give away the ending (which in any case I haven't yet read), but Mustafa tells me the affair leads the hero, Mohammed, to a deeper understanding of himself and his cultural heritage in a traumatic time for Muslims in the West.
I can't wait to read it, and I wish him the very best of luck.
The latest from Goldman Sachs elevator gossip. First GS banker: "Haircuts are the ultimate economic indicator. In bad times, it's every eight weeks; in good times, it's every six."
Second GS banker: "I go every three."
The latest overheard in the Gate Village in DIFC. Young banker type looking at a painting in art shop window: "I like it, but it just doesn't say enough to me for US$50,000 [Dh183,660]."
His female companion: "If that's how you value a work of art, you'll never make money out of it."
True, I swear. You couldn't make it up.
