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THE LEMON soap opera has taken a new twist. Seven months after it closed, apparently forever, Sweny’s chemists has risen from the dead and ascended into a sort of Joycean heaven. Maybe Leopold Bloom’s fictional visit in 1904 really did immortalise the place after all.

The premises reopened quietly in recent days, under a new management determined to save it: still selling the soap famously bought by Bloom, and a range of other merchandise loosely connected with either the pharmacy, or James Joyce, or both. As luck would have it, the first customer in was a man from Connecticut who knew nothing about the shop’s literary connections. He bought a pair of nail clippers for €3. The money is now stored behind the counter as the latest exhibit in what will also be a living museum.