Time to raise a glass to Joyce

There seem to be no limits to the devotion of James Joyce fans. On February 2nd, a couple of dozen Irish people gathered upstairs at the James Joyce pub in Paris (which doubles as the Ryanair transit terminal) to celebrate the 118th anniversary of the writer's birth and the 78th anniversary of the arrival in the Dijon-Paris train of the first edition of Ulysses.

Brian Loughney, the former banker who owns a string of pub in the US, Ireland, France, Spain and Belgium, already holds a Bloomsday lunch every June. Loughney asked guests, including Ambassador Patrick O'Connor and his wife Patricia to think of new ways to celebrate February 2nd. The long and well-watered lunch was replete with Joycean allusions - kidneys for the second course, followed by Dublin coddle; a piano player to remind us of Nora Barnacle's comment that the family would have been better off if her husband had kept to the keyboard. Brian Loughney held up his thick, black, gold-embossed first edition of Ulysses - number 30 of 100 signed by Joyce.

The 1894 Irish education board exam results showed what a poor student Joyce was, earning 425 out of 1,200 points in English. But however great his later talent, Joyce was not a very nice person. He and his publisher Sylvia Beach celebrated the February 2nd anniversary of Ulysses for about 10 years - until he demanded that the woman who had supported him and his family give the book rights back. The journalist Emer O'Kelly, who had flown from Dublin for the lunch, said that "whatever monstrous things he did when his art was at stake, James Joyce was a good guest". The best way to celebrate him, she suggested, was in food and wine.