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“We don’t have to do anything special for Bloomsday,” said Steve Delaney, the pub’s assistant manager “Bloomsday comes and finds us The place will be packed We’re expecting about 400 people, dressed in Edwardian gear. Yes, we’ve ordered pounds of Gorgonzola – although, of course, it’s not to everyone’s taste Some people will make this their base and stay all day. Bloom famously starts his day with a fried pig’s kidney from Dlugacz’s butcher shop (one of the few inaccurate Dublin names in Ulysses – in fact, Dlugacz was a conceited Hungarian Jew whom Joyce met and disliked in Z?h, and took his revenge by making him a pork butcher), and so the street will be closed off for a gargantuan Irish fry-up, complete with alfresco singing and recitals and street theatre.Determined souls will visit Glasnevin Cemetery where Joyce’s parents are buried, and where, in Ulysses, Bloom attends Paddy Dignam’s funeral. At lunchtime, we will all do the Chapter 8 promenade, crossing the Liffey over O’Connell Bridge and heading for Grafton Street (“Grafton Street gay with housed awnings lured his senses. Muslin prints, silk, dames and dowagers, jingle of harnesses, hoofthuds lowringing in the baking causeway”), and there, we discover that Bloom is hungry: “Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely he mutely craved to adore.”Disdaining the sight of the lunchers in the Burton restaurant spitting gristle on to their plates, Bloom opts instead for Davy Byrnes pub, where he enjoys a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of red burgundy. The James Joyce Centre, a government-sponsored “interpretative centre”, is organising a mammoth Bloomsday Breakfast – not at Bloom’s house in Eccles Street (“It’s not a very nice street”) but in North Great George’s Street, near Parnell Square.

Stephen Dedalus teaches a class in Dalkey at 10am; at 11am, he’s seen walking on Sandymount beach, six miles away. He wouldn’t have had time to get there.”So, you can’t “walk the book” in real time You must instead succumb to some touristic initiatives. He disappears for three hours between 5pm and 8pm, and we don’t know where he has gone. In fact, there are so many gaps in the narrative, it’s impossible.”At the end of Chapter 5, Bloom is at the Turkish bath on Merrion Square. At the start of Chapter 6, he’s in Irishtown, several miles away. In the Sixties, however, small gatherings of scholars would meet in key streets and read extracts from the book. Soon, scenes were being enacted, for which the participants naturally dressed up.

It is only in the last 10 years that the whole town has started dressing up and showing off.Those who have read Ulysses with close attention have to face an uncomfortable fact, as expressed by David Butler, education officer at the James Joyce Centre: “I’m afraid that I must dispel the myth that the reader always knows where Bloom and Stephen are in the book, and that there’s a simple itinerary to pursue in the course of Bloomsday. Kavanagh later wrote:”I made the pilgrimageIn the Bloomsday swelter,From the Martello TowerTo the cabman’s shelter.”In fact, they did no such thing. The pilgrims called in to several hostelries on the way to Sandycove, began drinking at a ludicrously early hour, urinated against the wall of the Martello Tower, and were photographed for posterity, standing on the strand looking comprehensively off their faces. The story is told by Frank Delaney in his fine book, James Joyce’s Odyssey: A Guide to the Dublin of ‘Ulysses’ (Hodder, 1981).The Bloomsday perambulation didn’t start, fully fledged, just after the publication of Ulysses. It began in disgrace in 1954, when a starry group of Dublin literary drinkers, led by Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, Flann O’Brien and Anthony Cronin decided to mark 16 June with a group excursion.