Your man Bloom never existed at all did he, so why do we celebrate his day?

There's no denying that Leopold Bloom is a fictional character, but the centenary of his trip around Dublin, as immortalised by James Joyce in Ulysses, is coming up. The real 16 June 1904 was actually the day that Joyce first stepped out with a Galway servant girl called Nora Barnacle, who was later to become his wife.

Nora Barnacle? Are you sure he didn't make that one up too?

Well, there are three times as many Blooms in the Dublin telephone book as Barnacles in the Galway directory, and it does sound a bit Dickensian, but it is accepted that Joyce was indeed married to the strangely named Galwegian, who, eh, stuck to him for the rest of his days.

So is there anything special about Bloomsday this year?

Where have you been? The notion of dressing up in Edwardian gear and eating Gorgonzola sandwiches seems to have started with the 50th anniversary in 1954, when a clatter of writers and journalists got together to celebrate the still-frownedupon book. David Norris has been a regular sight about town for years each June resplendent in a straw boater. This centenary year will see your average school lunchbox coming down with fried kidneys and gorgonzola sambos, while Dublin bus route No 3 is being abolished for the day in favour of the tram to Sandymount.

You made up that last bit, didn't you?

Well okay, but you don't think those delays in building the Luas were just down to inefficiency and politicians faffing around? The return of the tram is mooted for sometime this summer.

What else is going on?

Hundreds of events are taking place, with a Bloomsday Centenary Committee co-ordinating a full programme from 1 April to the end of August (www.

rejoycedublin2004. com). The highlight of the ReJoyce festival ? at least for the scholars ? is the 19th International James Joyce Symposium (www.

bloomsday100. org) in the National Concert Hall, Earlsfort Terrace and the National College of Ireland on the Custom House dock from 12 to 19 June.

Sounds a bit high falutin'?

Well, they promise hundreds of lectures and discussions on all sorts of topics, from 'Stepping out of the Page:

Kate Bush's Joycean (Re)creations' by Patricia Smith of Hofstra University, to 'Some Effects and Implications of Narrative Omniscience in Ulysses' by Weldon Thornton of the University of North Carolina.

The symposium finishes with Paddy Dignam's Wake in The Vaults, (19 June, 7.30pm, tickets .20, .30, .60). But there are many other events to suit all brows ? from a punk concert to a free breakfast for twice as many as they managed with five loaves and two fishes.

Now you're talking. I hope it's not kidneys, or indeed loaves and . shes?

Those nice people from Denny are laying on a spread for 10,000 people next weekend in a giant open air breakfast in O'Connell Street. The menu features rashers, sausages, pudding and something called a hash brown. Mr Joyce might have recognised it as a potato cake, but I doubt it.

Tickets are available free for three of the four sittings of 9am, 10am and 11am ? noon is booked out ? on the website www. rejoycedublin 2004. com. Definitely no offal there, but Bewley's of Grafton Street and Westmoreland Street will do you a splendid feast of more authentic Joycean provenance. Whether James would be able to taste the urine off their kidneys is probably not allowed to be speculated upon by the Environmental Health Authority. The James Joyce Centre (41 North Great Georges Street, www. james joyce. ie) also host a meal involving the inner organs of beast and fowl on the day itself.

Back to the punk concert. Was Jem a safety-pin-through-thenose man?

Don't be stupid, but he would have enjoyed the iconoclasm and irreverence of the genre.

The Radiators from Space, who made Ireland's greatest rock ? not just punk ? album of all time, have reformed for a once-off Bloomsnight gig in The Village, Wexford Street, 8pm, tickets .20 (www.

mcd. ie). Their second album, Ghostown, is arguably Irish popular music's equivalent to Ulysses. It certainly pays homage to Joyce, with 'The Song of the Faithful Departed' using several scenes from the book.

Give us a few bars then The song, written by Phil Chevron, later a member of the Pogues, is a heady mixture of drink, religion and Irish literature: it ends thus: "Maybe we'll even climb the Pillar like you always meant to, and watch the sun rise over the Strand, Close our eyes and we'll pretend that it could somehow be the same again. And I'll bury you upright so the sun doesn't blind you, and you don't have to gaze at the rain and the stars, You'll sleep and dream of the Moral Bar, and whiskey in the jar." Powerful stuff. Anything else worth seeing?

The panel below gives a select listing of the many events on show in the next couple of weeks. The biggest event will see O'Connell Street sealed off on the evening of the 16th for The Parable of The Plums, recreating the scene where two old ladies spat plumstones down on the citizens below from the platform on Nelson's Pillar. Whether they will scale the Spike is unclear.

So if I take the day off on 16 June, where should I start?

Well, the tower in Sandycove where Stephen Dedalus and stately plump Buck Mulligan lived is a must (.3.20 adult day return on the Dart from the city centre) but expect it to be crowded (MondaySaturday: 10am-5pm, Sundays 2-6pm, Adults: .6.25, Concession: .5.25, Children:

.3.75, Family: .17.50). Midsummer is as good a time as any to take the plunge in the nude forty foot bathing area, but don't expect it to be anything but freezing.

The south inner suburb of Sandymount (.2.25 Dart day return from city) has long treasured its links with the writer. Joyce spent the night before Bloomsday in Dromard Terrace, two minutes from the main street, as guest of James and Gretta Cousins. They were quite an eccentric couple, genuine Californian hippies 60 years too early. Vegetarian, mystical theosophists, they abstained from sex throughout their marriage and Gretta was jailed in both London and Dublin for suffragette vandalism.

The Star of the Sea church, mentioned in Dubliners, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, is the venue for an exhibition of photographs of Dublin in Bloom's time, followed by an evening of Edwardian music hall songs, a talk on Dublin in the Quare Old Times and supper (tickets .10 on the door or from 01-6602735). The part of Sandymount strand where Stephen walked into eternity has been filled in and is now a GAA club, a colourful housing estate and a park where Joyce is commemorated with a series of wandering rock sculptures.

It's a good walk from Paddy Dignam's house in Newbridge Avenue (five minutes from the Star of the Sea) to Glasnevin Cemetery, so vehicular transport is required, preferably a coach and four with black plumes.

The atmospheric cemetery is home to many who once walked round Dublin; the Faithful Departed. The phrase is the title of a marvellous book of Lawrence Collection photographs collected by the late Kieran Hickey, film maker and Joyce buff, which has just been reissued by Lilliput Press (.15).

Bloom later stopped in Davy Byrne's 'moral bar' at 21 Duke Street (01-6775217, www. davybyrnespub. com), for a glass of burgundy and a gorgonzola sandwich with a dab of mustard (available next week for just over .10).

Take a quick step across the street to the Bailey pub where the door of Bloom's home in No 7 Eccles Street adorns the wall.

Cross over Dawson Street, helping any blind piano tuners you can find, and head for the National Library to check out the excellent exhibition (www. nli. ie), and try to picture Bloom encountering Buck and Stephen on the steps. The library is free to enter but a reader's ticket is required.

You could of course finish up in Nighttown in search of the modern equivalent of Georgina Johnson, but internet websites are all the rage for such things these days, we hear. Whatever, don't go wandering the streets of Monto as the working girls are long gone.

An alternative ending would be on Eccles Street in the north inner city where Leopold and Molly Bloom lived (No 7 is no more, the Mater Private Hospital stands on the site). Molly's passionate rounding off of her day closes Ulysses. You might get lucky.

For adventurous perambulators, a recommended course is to get a copy of Walking Dublin (New Holland 1998, £9.99) by Pat Liddy, indefatigible chronicler of the city's history, which includes a nice 'Ulysses Walk' from Eccles Street to the Ormond Hotel.

Enough of this impenetrable book.

Where was Joyce himself born?

41 Brighton Square which, like several of Dublin's squares, is not a square at all. Brighton Triangle just hasn't got the ring to it that is required in Rathgar. The young Joyce was born on 2 February 1881 to John and Mary in this modest Victorian red brick, a fact commemorated by a bronze plaque oddly placed between the upstairs windows. It reads 'Birthplace of James Joyce, poet and novelist 18811941. Presented by Montclair State College, New Jersey, Bloomsday 1964.' Did he have a happy childhood there?

Not that he ever recalled, because he left for the neighbouring suburb of Rathmines at the age of three. In fact, had he arranged for Bloom to visit each of Joyce's various Dublin homes he would have had a ready-made sequel.

Vivien Igoe, in the useful James Joyce's Dublin Houses (Mandarin, 1990), traces around 15 places in the city and environs that the author could call home: Castlewood Ave, Rathmines; Martello Tce, Bray; Clongowes Wood, Sallins; Carysfort Ave, Blackrock; Hardwicke St;

Fitzgibbon St; Millbourne Ave, Drumcondra; North Richmond St; Windsor Ave, Convent Ave, Richmond Ave and Royal Tce, all in Fairview; Glengarriff Parade; St Peter's Tce, Phibsborough and Shelbourne Rd, Ballsbridge. Before he left Ireland he spent a few days at the house in Dromard Terrace, Sandymount and a week in the Martello Tower, Sandycove.

A week? And they call it Joyce's tower?

Well, to be fair, it's a bit prettier than most of his homes, and you can't begrudge a few Yanks having a nice trip out on the Dart and getting some bracing sea air (www. visitdublin. com/ attractions/james joyce. asp).

Joyce stayed at the invitation of his friend Oliver St John Gogarty, while another writer, Samuel Chenevix Trench was also residing there. On his fifth night in the tower, Joyce was awakened by Trench screaming, the result of a nightmare involving a panther. Trench picked up a revolver and fired several shots into the fireplace, whereupon Gogarty grabbed a .22 rifle and fired at a collection of pans above Joyce's bed.

Utterly freaked by this, James pulled on his clothes and fled in the rain.

Ah, I can see why it might have had an impact on him Indeed, and it makes a starring appearance in the first chapter of Ulysses. The tower was opened as a Joycean museum on Bloomsday 1962, and is well worth a visit. Joyce left the country with Nora shortly after moving out of the tower, returning briefly to Dublin in 1909 and 1912. The first of those trips saw him set up Ireland's first cinema, The Volta, at 45 Mary Street.

Any other Joycean sites worth checking out?

Along the quays, the house at 15 Usher's Island (which isn't an island) where Joyce set his best-known short story 'The Dead', was recently renovated and is open to the public with guided tours at 2pm each day for .6. (www. jamesjoyce house. com) If you're out westside, The Mullingar House pub in Chapelizod (9Mullingar Tce, 01-6208692) is the model for the pub where Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker slept in Finnegans Wake.

In town, the dilapidated and inaccessible Academy cinema in Pearse Street was once the Ancient Concert Rooms where Joyce won second prize in a singing contest that also featured Count John McCormack on the bill.

Around the corner from there is Lincoln Place, where Bloom went for a Turkish bath, although the baths are now demolished. The last building on the right of Lincoln Place is a newsagent, once the site of Finn's hotel, where Nora Barnacle worked as a chambermaid.

Painted on the side wall is the hotel's name, recently revealed when Trinity chopped down some tall trees.

North of the Liffey there are many places with Joyce connections, notably Belvedere College where he was schooled and was prefect of the school sodality, equivalent to head boy.

There are several memorials to the writer, notably a jaunty statue in North Earl Street, close to the Spike, and a bust in Merrion Square.

This is all very well, but it sounds exhausting. I think I'll stay in bed and read the bloody book Don't be ridiculous. Nobody reads the book. Get out there and do something Joycean for the day, and it needn't involve sashaying around with the professional Joyce set.

Joyce boasted that if Dublin were ever levelled it could be rebuilt just by using Ulysses. He would be a bit disturbed by a lot of what has happened to the city, but as Dublin, unlike many other European capitals, escaped 20th century wartime destruction, much still remains of what he knew.

The footsteps he walked, albeit now concreted over, wend past the same shops, churches and colleges.

So venerate Joyce in the way Dubliners do each and every day: walk those streets, sup those pints, visit the lofty clattery cafe of Bewley's, have a stroll along Sandymount Strand (but do refrain from the solitary pleasuring Bloom indulged in there) and enjoy the town he helped make the world's greatest literary city.