If only I’d had a really profligate, sleazy past in the docklands of Buenos Aires, lived at the bottom like a crab, and gorged myself shamelessly on everything I came across, preferably killed someone with a rock to the head, as Rimbaud may have done, and, like him, fled to Africa and made a living as an arms smuggler, yes, anything but this, on a hotel balcony in the Canary Islands with two small children and a pregnant wife sleeping on the other side of the sliding-glass door, and all that this loaded the future with in terms of propriety and responsibility.
There are very few people that could pull off references to TS Elliott and Rambeau with such flair from a hotel balcony in the Canaries. This particular trip description in the book had me in stitches.
