A week in Dubai is long enough to see an entire new office block erected here. It’s also long enough to form friendships with other writers over the kind of book-talk that even the most well-read partner or friend will eventually grow sick of, if they aren’t writers. In the coming weeks I’ll be blogging about some of these writers, whose work in some cases I didn’t even know before the festival. In all cases they have proven to be warm, intelligent and open to new ideas.

I might even be tweeting about them. Because last night, after a cruise up the Dubai (manmade) Creek, I was chatting with Margaret Atwood. I had noted in an article about her that she has 100,000 followers on Twitter. As someone with…less of a tweeting profile, I asked her how I could get to such Twittering prominence.

“Pretend to be a silly old woman,” she said.

I was sure she wasn’t referring to herself. She’s 71, but silly she most certainly is not. So I said: “I can do that.”

“The question is, whether you want to be seen as silly or serious,” she responded.

“The point is to get 100,000 followers. Is silly or serious best?”

“But what do you want to do with them?”

100,000 followers? Surely at least a few of them would send me all their money. Or some soiled, sexy underwear. No, stick with what’s important. “Well, I want to persuade them to read my books.”

“Aaaah,” Margaret said, with the air of someone who’s heard that before. She wagged her finger and said, “Weeeellll….” She went on to explain that while she might be able to get some of her 100,000 followers to buy my books, I would have to re-tweet an awful lot of other people’s online tat before I got enough followers to exert such svengali-like influence over them. The problem is, I don’t read all that much online stuff so how would I retweet it. Unless of course, I retweet things blind… But that would be silly.

In fact, I fear that if I were to tweet and retweet, I might turn into a silly old woman rather quickly. Gossiping, lacking concentration, easily offended. (That, at least, is what silly old women are like where I come from. I apologise if you have a different experience of them.)

I should add that not all old women are silly. Which is why not all old women tweet. Or perhaps they aren’t silly because they don’t tweet.

I’d better call an end to this. It’s silly.

I couldn’t work out what it was that had transformed them. Then I saw it. “Your teeth are very white,” I said.

“Crest White Strips,” they both responded, winningly candid as people from Ohio often are. I was sure I had been looking at her breasts, but in fact it had been her dentistry.

I had a book tour coming up, some visits to France and Germany and the UK. I’m a pretty confident fellow, but, I reasoned, every little helps when an author ventures out of his usual environment (a single room where he spends his days alone, his features sagging through a lack of the necessity to give other people facial cues) and into the world of public speaking and grinning. So I slapped Crest’s strips of gel encased in thin plastic over my espresso-mellowed averagely yellowish teeth, having first been assured by my dental hygienist that “it won’t make them fall out, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Naturally I charmed everyone I came into contact with on that trip, even my mother. Of course I can’t say no one noticed. My French publicist asked me if my teeth had been “blanchissées,” shortly after she warned me not to seduce her intern, whom she had temptingly described as “beautiful and stupid.” I denied any interest in either teeth-whitening or gorgeously vapid French students, even going so far as to point out that I had already engaged in congress with a beautiful, stupid French woman when I lived in New York and wasn’t game for a repeat performance. She puffed on her cigarette and puffed out her cheeks with a lift of the eyebrows, a Parisienne gesture which means “It’s neither here nor there to me, but you’re full of it, mon ami.”

Blanchissées, I suppose I added a tiny element of swagger to my person at a time when one or two other elements of my life were equally tinily deswaggering me. I didn’t seek those elements out, so I see no reason not to have counterbalanced them with a technique which ordinarily would never have appealed to me.

This winter and spring I have some similar book tour events coming up. But I’ve discovered that none of the pharmacies in Jerusalem where I used to buy my White Strips stocks them any more. No one will tell me where I can get them (the pharmacists, being from the Middle East, substitute a brief closing of their eyes and a dismissive click of their tongue for the sentence “Sorry, sir, but I’m afraid I can’t help you.”)

I’m seeing my dentist for a check-up next week. He’s been at me to use his very much more expensive whitening service. Not in an overt way. But he’s a Manchester United supporter, so he’s accustomed to winning. Will he get me this time, in the absence of White Strips? Maybe so…

I can’t be sure. I do want those white teeth. I want people to be slightly disturbed in a way they don’t understand each time they look at me. I want people to think I’m richer than I am. I want them to feel as though a holy light has shone upon them when I smile.

It could be the difference between a book that doesn’t sell so well and a bestseller. Take Zadie Smith, for example. Sure, most of the people who bought “White Teeth” were seduced by the inordinate media hype. But many of them were subliminally attracted to the idea of white teeth, I’m sure of it. (For the same reason, I read Kundera’s “Immortality” years after I had decided never to bother with the old fool ever again.)

I have so many other attributes which might be considered favorable when it comes to appearance and impressions. I’m tall. I’m not overweight, in fact I’m rather trim. One interviewer described me as “ruggedly handsome.” I wear fine clothes and I travel with several sets of underwear in my suitcase. I have a British accent (everyone loves that, admit it). I don’t smoke and I haven’t fallen over drunk since 1994. Neither acne nor dandruff decorate me.

I ought hardly to undercut such components with a set of teeth the color of crème brulé. It would be a betrayal of everything for which I stand. I work hard on my books; I spend hours formulating interesting topics for blog posts (Well, mostly those are joke blog posts, but the ones I actually write take up some time nonetheless…); and my Facebook page doesn’t update itself, you know.

Here’s a tempter for you: Next time I’m speaking at a book fair near you, come along and out me as a teeth-whitener. But, for the sake of my marriage, leave your interns at home. Unless they aren’t French…

Why am I paraphrasing the great Hunter S. Thompson? Because I endured an experience that Professor Gonzo could only have imagined in his wildest LSD frenzies. Something that made me feel I must be hallucinating, as if the Las Vegas of HST’s fear and loathing had come to me, cleaned up and waterless but every bit as insidious. What I saw was proof that we have no limits in our power to suck every last cent out of every possible human moment.

I was urinating. Into a urinal. At a rest stop outside Germany’s business capital. When I looked down, I didn’t see the accustomed maker’s logo. No, there was a video screen. About six inches across and four inches high. Bright, bright high-definition. Built into the top of the urinal. Advertising itself as the product of Urimat.com.

They’re insidious, these Urimat people, I tell you, brother urinator. They must’ve done years of research to assess exactly where males let their eyes drop when peeing. It’s not on your unit. No, because that necessitates looking at the disgusting mess of the urinal itself, the chewing gum and receipt papers and hairs, oh God the curly hairs. We look higher than that. But not so high that we must confront the wall in front of us, with its vicious graffiti and its smears of nose-booger.

We look right at the top of the urinal, we brothers in urination. And the bastards at Urimat thought: Why waste all that time, when men are looking at nothing? Let’s make them look at a housewife, scrubbing her kitchen and bathroom. Let’s make them watch as “The dirt goes, the aroma stays.”

Can’t you picture Baron Urimat now, in his boardroom overlooking Feldbachstrasse in Feldbach, Switzerland – for this is where they have their evil mountain lair – saying to his henchmen: “When they have their dirty little units in their hands, the path to men’s minds lies open. Let us feed this psychological emptiness. Before they put themselves back in their pants and walk out without washing their hands. Let us take control of their minds.”

I can hear the evil laughter now.

I had thought the final invasion of our most trivial moments had been the video screens in the back of New York taxi cabs. They’re noisy, but at least you can turn them off – most of them, anyway. And in New York you fully expect to be assaulted and irritated at every turn. (It has its benefits, too. When the driver turns on his meter, the cab used to broadcast Judd Hirsch of “Taxi” fame saying, “Buckle up for safety.” Or did he? I always thought the devilish Hirsch was actually slurring “Fuck a lot for safety.” The rogue.)

But no, brothers, it can get worse than the NYC taxis. Imagine, even if there was a button to turn off the urinal-top video screen, how depraved and disgusting would be the man who would actually press his finger down to activate it. I remind you, it’s on top of the urinal where you and thousands of truckers pee.

That’s the cruel logic at the heart of capitalism. Oh, yes, it’s true that the irresistibility of the urinal-top video screen is the furthest reach, as yet, of the dread control of Adam Smith’s hidden hand. It can’t be avoided. It can’t be switched off. Yet you must pee. It’s as though Wharton MBAs were being told to read “1984,” with admiration for Big Brother.

Next time I go on a book tour to Germany, I shall be riding the railways. They’re state-run. Surely they’ll be a couple of years behind on the urinal-top technology. I can void my bladder with nothing but the clack of the rails in my ears, as generations of men did before.

So the Urimat urinals are waterless and are going to save the world. But what kind of environment will it be? Ah, brothers, the future is a deformed bastard son of the world it could’ve been.

Bielefeld (population 330,000) is a town in North Rhine-Westphalia. Or is it?

Since the 1990s, there has been a widespread internet campaign to convince Germans that this town doesn’t exist. It began as a light-hearted battle over computer codings between some fellows in Bielefeld and others elsewhere (who took a different view of the coding and decided to fight back.) Even though most of them know it exists (or do they?), Germans often respond to mention of Bielefeld with the words, “Bielefeld doesn’t exist.”

This is because the town is rarely visited, doesn’t have a regional accent of its own, isn’t mentioned in the news very often, and had for a long time a railway station that looked boarded up. There are also few monuments or great buildings there, because…well, you can thank the USAAF and the RAF for that. (Bielefeld isn’t far from the Ruhr and was heavily bombed in World War II.)

The city council once released a statement titled “Bielefeld does exist,” but they released it on April Fools Day. So it looked as though the city council even was saying Bielefeld didn’t exist.

But I went there. And it does exist. In fact, it’s quite nice.

I did a reading before a good crowd at the Beit Tikwa Synagogue. Which used to be a church until the congregation grew too small. (A year and a half ago, there was a protest against the conversion of a Christian place of worship to a Jewish one. The protest was lead by a fellow named Riefenstahl, nephew of Hitler’s favorite filmmaker Leni, and frankly someone who ought to, shall we say, avoid Jewish issues, just as a matter of good taste.) Beit Tikwa is beautiful, as is Katharina Lustgarten, who organized and introduced my reading.

If a synagogue seems like a good use for an old church, a restaurant is even better. A one-time church in Bielefeld is now Gluekundseligkeit, a swanky Asian restaurant with a long bar down the aisle. In armchairs on the altar, you can drink wine where the pastor used to bless the holy wine. I had a very fine stewed duck.

I dined there with Andreas Schnadwinkel, a pal who writes for the Westfalenblatt newspaper, and Thomas Wolff, an imposing actor at Theater Bielefeld, who read from my work at the synagogue and at another reading in nearby Bad Oeynhausen the previous night.

Thomas and I repaired to the old part of town and a bar, where we chatted about the kinds of things only writers and actors would find interesting or useful (how to tap into spirit energies to create a character and to experience an emotion…) That central area also was quite lovely.

Then I was on to Cologne. On a local radio station, I mentioned during my interview that I had been to Bielefeld the previous day. “You know,” said the hostess, “Bielefeld doesn’t exist.”

Maybe I was tricked.

That’s what happened this week when I was invited to the Goethe-Institut in Jerusalem’s Talbiyeh neighborhood to talk about writing in the city with two other locally based writers.

I realized why I don’t write about Jerusalem. Even though I live there. Live here, I mean.

Ann-Kathrin Seidel, the German journalist who organized the evening, asked the other two participants why they write about Jerusalem, though they don’t live there. Both of them have lived long periods of time in Jerusalem, but now live in Tel Aviv. Both said that life in Jerusalem was so intense, they needed just a little space in order to have the energy to write about the place. (Tel Aviv is only one hour’s drive away, so it is, truly, just a little space.)

Gil Yaron, a doctor and a journalist who has authored an excellent book called “Jerusalem: a Political-Historical City Guide,” writes about Israel and the Palestinians from his home in Tel Aviv. Miriam Woelke writes from there no less then five blogs about life in the ultra-Orthodox community – she’s ultra-Orthodox herself though, unlike almost every other woman in that world, she wasn’t wearing a puffy shirt and voluminous skirt. She had on an orange t-shirt and baggy Capri pants. Both write in English and German, having grown up in Germany.

At first I thought Ann-Kathrin’s question didn’t apply to me. After all, I live in Jerusalem. I have long resisted the temptation to trundle down to the coast to where the restaurants are better and the people less aggressive. I’ve thought about living there, but I admit that as a native of a hilly country, I can’t live anywhere completely flat. I’m always lost in Tel Aviv, even though there’s barely a street there I haven’t been down over the years. No slopes from which to orient myself. (It could be that’s why I always know where I am in Dehaisha Refugee Camp, which is on a hill so steep that it almost seems upside down…Maybe there’s another reason why it seems upside down, but that’s for another blog post…)

I thought there were many reasons I haven’t written a novel about Jerusalem. That I see the place every day and it becomes harder truly to see it, for example. But Gil and Miriam made me see something deeper.

People often ask me if I live in a Palestinian neighborhood of Jerusalem, or one of the Palestinian towns where my books are set (Nablus, Bethlehem, Gaza). I tell them that I find it too exhausting to be in those places for very long, and so I don’t live there. Exhausting because my senses are so creatively active the whole time I’m there. The smell of spices and donkey crap, the light that reflects so brightly off the limestone, the dusty wind, the sense of history in the old casbah and the ancient churches.

When I return to the West Jerusalem neighborhood where I live, it’s as though I’ve visited another continent. I can allow my creativity to stabilize, let myself make some sense of what I’ve seen and felt. Only then can I write about it.

It may sound like going to a Metallica gig to get some peace and quiet, but it’s true: Jerusalem is my refuge.

The other writers are:

Gil Yaron, doctor and journalist. Yaron was born in Haifa, grew up in Germany and studied in Israel and the US. Today he’s a leading expert for the Middle East, present in newspapers, radio and television. 2007 Yaron published the book “Jerusalem. A historical and political guide”.

Miriam Woelke, blogger. Woelke emigrated from Germany to Israel ten years ago. The former yeshiva student has been covering Jerusalem and haredi issues in English and German on several blogs for four years.

That’s not because I think the prime minister should be overfond of alcohol (at Oxford, Cameron was a member of a very upper-crust private drinking club famed for smashing places up). Rather, it’s because Cameron is the wrong man to unite the pub-drinkers and the rowdy aristocrats — and all the other splinters of a society still shattered by Margaret Thatcher’s destruction of the old identity of Empire.

The coalition Cameron will lead reflects an identity crisis among the English that has developed in the two decades since Thatcher’s reign. It’s much deeper than mere political divisions, and I don’t think he’s equipped to resolve it.

Read the rest of my article on AOL News.

Thinking differently is usually thought of negatively in the Middle East. Which is why there was a bit of a stink recently when the Israeli ambassador to the US boycotted a J Street convention. As though this pro-Israel group were somehow anti-Israeli, simply because it poses questions Israel would rather avoid. Just as in the US, anyone who isn’t on the mad end of the Republican party is some kind of Communist.

I was very pleasantly surprised that I was asked to speak about portraying Israel/Palestine as an artist. I’m often asked to speak to groups about my books, only to end up being urged to comment on questions like “Will non-violence ever catch on among Palestinians?” or “Has Netanyahu changed?” Well, I have opinions on these things, but really I’m a bit bored with them…

Not only was I — and the two Israeli filmmakers also invited to speak on Wednesday night — charged with talking about my creative work, but many of the people in the J Street group were writers, playwrights, visual artists. In other words, people who believe that the best path in life might not revolve around hard cash and political trash.

The J Street group had just come from a meeting with Tzipi Livni, former Israeli Foreign Minister and head of the Kadima Party. They thought of her as a hope for the future and rather inspiring. I’ve always found her to be whiny and negative, and if she’s still leader of Kadima in a year I’ll eat one of my son’s diapers. (I’ll post it to youtube to prove that I’m true to my word.) But I try to be polite at these events and in any case people ought to take their inspiration wherever they can get it in such generally uninspiring times in the Middle East, so I kept quiet.

One of the other filmmakers invited by J Street was Arik Bernstein, whose Gaza Sderot project is one of the most interesting sets of short films about Israelis and Palestinians made in years. Though the website/films are very sensitive to the fact that they’re about a conflict, they’re really quite lovely cultural insights into the way the two people’s cope with the division around them. Take a look at the films, in particular the one where a Gazan laughs that the tunnels under the Egyptian border ought to be expanded so that jokes can be smuggled through. “We need more humor,” he says. Amen, habibi.

Then you go to another foreign country, only to discover that it doesn’t seem so foreign. And you realize that the place you live actually IS extremely foreign.

That’s what happened to me during the last week, when I toured Germany to read from my third Palestinian rime novel THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET (just published by CH Beck Verlag as “Der Tote von Nablus.”)

I was in Munich station when I noticed in a pastry shop that Germans spell pretzel with a B (“Brezel”). I felt a little blown away, as though I’d been living a lie all these years offering my son “pretzels.” But that’s as foreign as Germany got. Otherwise, this Welshman felt right at home there.

Right off the plane on my return to Israel, however, the country which has been my home since 1996 and where I’ve grown accustomed to the way people behave, the foreignness hit me anew.

Actually even before that. The fellow in the seat next to me on the flight from Frankfurt kept talking to me – Israelis have a way of talking a lot and they can also be rather clueless about my oh-so-subtle signals that I’d rather read my book. While I was eating, he reached over and took part of my bread roll with a smile and gentle touch of my forearm. (Bread is something you share in Middle Eastern meals, although it usually applies to pita and flatbread, not to tiny airline rolls. This was pretty extreme space-invasion, even for a Middle Easterner, but the reassuring friendly gestures while he was taking advantage of me were very familiar.)

Then in the airport, the dimensions of personal space shrank from the yard kept by Germans to an elbow-brushing, back-nudging Middle Eastern minimum. I smiled, because the Tel Aviv airport is very flashy and new – you could be anywhere in the world. But it’s most definitely not the unflustered calm of Dresden airport, where I boarded my first flight of the day.

Arrival in a “foreign” country means a lot of things that’ll sound deeply negative – or at least they’ll sound like I’m being negative. The shoving and noise and the passport lines where people don’t actually wait in line but prefer to edge around you. But I’m not entirely negative about them. I like it (mostly), because I enjoy being an outsider. To be sure, I don’t think I’d like it much if I looked around and thought, “These are my people. This is my culture. This is ME.”

Then, I expect I’d want us to be more organized, more respectful of each other, less suspicious, more…foreign.

It struck me that “foreign” countries are simply the ones where things aren’t even remotely fair. That’s why everyone at the Tel Aviv airport hovers over the baggage carousel, shifting from foot to foot, edging in front of others closer to the bags. It suggests an absolute fear that the bag never will come and, most of all, that if all the bags happened to arrive all at once you must be the first one to grab yours and get away before the other suckers. Life in a “foreign” country is a zero-sum game, in which someone else’s success or happiness comes somehow at your expense and must be envied, hated, usurped.

That’s not a German quality. Germans have a sense that there’s some degree of fairness in their society and it makes relations between them less devious and Machiavellian, less on the make. They drive fast, but they don’t think someone else driving fast is attacking them on a macho level, signaling superiority and disdain for them, and, thus, respond by semi-subliminally trying to run them off the road.

So here I am, back in Jerusalem, back to being a foreigner.

Though I shouldn’t forget that at least Israelis spell pretzel with a P.

(I posted this on International Crime Authors Reality Check, a joint blog I do with some other crime writers. Check it out.)