Bloomsday 2014

I normally try and go fishing on June 16th each year - it is the first day of the season and the day after my birthday.  But this year (like last year) I have rather acute hay fever and I have postponed fishing for a few weeks.

Instead, Bloomsday was largely spent reading Kevin Birmingham's rather excellent book about the publication of Ulysses.  I hadn't realised that the USA was such a censored country until the 1930s.

It is over 30 years since I read Ulysses, one summer break from university and I remember little of it.  The scene where Leopold Bloom is cooking kidneys which he enjoys for the faint tang of urine, for instance.  I once used that line at a lunch - it did not go down well, and no one knew it would a line from Ulysses.

And Molly Bloom's stream of consciousness soliloquy.  I mainly know that now from Kate Bush's song, The Sensual World.

We own three copies of Ulysses it seems - plus a version on the Kindle.  Maybe I should dip into to it again.  But the complete audio book is 45 hours long - so maybe a complete read isn't on the cards