Stately Buck Norris takes breakfast on Bloomsday

From eight in the morning, the Bloomsday faithful started gathering outside the James Joyce Centre at 35 North Great George's Street yesterday.

This is the famous day Joyce had his first date with Nora Barnacle, the day Ulysses takes place, and the day which has spawned a gaggle of golden geese for our tourist industry.

On the steep Georgian street, the men's boaters became airborne in the brisk morning breeze, the women's long frocks blew up in aptly ribald fashion, and stately plump Buck Norris wielded the trademark Joycean walking stick.

It was noticeable yesterday that many of the assembled in their boaters and beards bore more resemblance to David Norris, the jolly rotund Joycean scholar, than to the skinny, brooding, black-clad writer himself.

Inside, a motley crew of politicians, diplomats and business folk including Minister Sile de Valera and Lord Mayor Joe Doyle, sat down to the traditional Blooms day breakfast, in which "urine-scented" offal figures strongly. There was a bit of diplomatic peering around from table to table to see how much of the perfumed offal other people were leaving behind on their plates.

The lesser mortals were seated in the little garden at the back of the centre. New Yorkers Eileen and Gerard Cannon were studying their Bloomsday breakfast with a slightly nervous eye. Gerard Cannon, a professor of English at Pace University in New York, poked the breaded kidney with distrust.

Even professors of English can do without the virtual Bloomsday experience. "He ate emu in some restaurant down town last night," Eileen confided, "but the kidneys have him beat."

Every second person was clutching their battered copies of Ulysses and comparing editions. "Ulysses in Japanese looks so absolutely wonderful," one fan shrieked, waving a Japanese translation. Canadian Michael Taylor had managed to find room in his backpack for his "ancient copy" of Ulysses.

Language scholars might have been a mite puzzled by the English translation of our national hello, Cead Mile Failte, which was writ large on a board behind the buffet. For those who thought it meant "A Hundred Thousand Welcomes", well, you've been fooled all those years. The Joyce Centre, bastion of literature, translates it as "Many Welcomes".

The readings from Ulysses kicked off with a bit of playful diplomatic mischief. The American ambassador, Michael Sullivan, read with gusto from the opening pages of the book, in which there is mention of "those bloody English - bursting with money and indigestion". Full of impending indigestion, the assembled crowd giggled. The British ambassador, Ivor Roberts, smiled gamely.

Dignitaries and guests were encouraged to choose their own passages, which threw up some intriguing insights. Helen Shaw of RTE read a passage from Sirens. Sirens, of course, are those mysterious sea-nymphs, part-woman part-bird, who lure the unsuspecting toward an untimely doom.