Thursday 28 November Expat feed. But for me it's always been thrillingly marginal. It's a city of grandiose eccentricity. Its statues are not of heroes and kings but whippets and frogs. The buses are known by fractions of numbers " Packs of dogs take themselves for sober walks in public gardens. The Virgin Mary is a field marshal, and her effigies wear the sash of office.
Old Italian gunboats ply the river, and little notices advise people not to urinate on the plants. It's not unusual to see ice-cream sellers with flutes or tipper-trucks packed with soldiers of Imperial Prussia.
Once, I even saw a man carrying a large crucifix, festooned with bags of goldfish. He wasn't even mad. On his tour of the town, we visited a cage full of jaguars, a supermarket selling assault rifles and a scaled-down replica of the White House.
Although I've always preferred to stay downtown, in raffish Napoleonic splendour, the smugglers and the rich live uptown, in a Legoland of whimsy. Strangest of all are the docks. To me, they've always belonged among the darker recesses of Conrad. Drinking shops have hopeless landlocked names such as "Geneva" and "Zurich" Brothels open on to the street and are divided into pens, like piggeries.
Great finned monsters sizzle and hiss on the cobbles, and even the graffiti is unfathomable: "Restless! I first went to Paraguay in , when I was 18, arriving in a smuggler's truck. I'd been working on an estancia in Argentina, and fled when the Falklands War began. Life suddenly slowed to a few frames per second in this languid, sensuous city. Relief turned to warmth and surprise, which is much how I feel today. Best of all, I've always felt myself among beguiling friends.
