Bloomsday lite

We used to celebrate Bloomsday with a licensed stroll around the centre of London, attempting to capture some of the flavour of the great book known as 'Ulysses Revisited'. Given that it was first published in serial form, in much the same way as our own great authors of yesteryear, we sometimes added a bit of spice to the proceedings by trying to pick up relevant copies of 'The Little Review' from the secondhand bookshops at that time scattered around Charing Cross Road and neighbouring streets. We got to 5 out of the 18 parts before the fun got taken out of it by the arrival of ebay, where today, for example, you can get a perfectly good example of one of the parts for a little over £100.

Nowadays we have to settle for something a little lighter on the stomach, in fact not a stroll at all, just a sedentary glass or two.

On this occasion I got off to a bad start by forgetting to take either my free bus pass or my older persons' rail card, which fact I did not realise until I had already bought my discounted rail ticket. I decided to risk the penalty fare payable for not being able to present one's rail card to an authorised representative of SouthWest Trains, rather than buy the proper ticket. I then wondered what would happen if the buses around Tooting had stopped taking payment in cash, but this turned out to be just a touch of older persons' paranoia as the buses will be taking cash for another few weeks yet and I was, later in the day, £2.40 out of pocket, this being the fare from Tooting Broadway to Earlsfield.

But I get ahead of myself. The first stop was a new bookshop, just down from Earlsfield Station, which claimed to be a descendant, in some sense at least, of both the bookshop which used to be under Earlsfield Station and the rather larger one which used to be under Balham Station. The first of these was the source of the various copies of books about boats from Janes, with which I used to entertain sprog 2, when of a naval age, so it seemed appropriate, not finding anything Joycean apart from a rather battered paperback copy of 'Ulysses Revisited', to buy a battered paperback copy of the Navy List from 1966 in which I was later able to look up my naval uncle, to find that at that time he was serving on H.M.S. Triumph, a ship which must have been rather a dangerous place in which to work as it ran to no less than three surgeon commanders. Oddly, the naval uncle was not listed amongst its senior officers in the ship part of the List, perhaps an example of the sort of inconsistency which can creep in when one's book is not underpinned by a proper database on a proper computer. One can only suppose that an MoD publication of this vintage was driven by index cards rather than chips. Or perhaps, I have missed some important part of List etiquette and the omission was not a mistake at all. On the other hand, I was able to confirm that the senior naval dentist held the rank of Rear Admiral and that the senior naval parson did not hold a naval rank at all, being an archdeacon of the Church of England. The Catholics and the Wee Frees got a look in, but the Jews did not, at least not in the List; they may well have appeared on the ground.

And so onto Wetherspoons, where we moved on from the sort of discussion which might have been appropriate to the topers of ante-bellum Dublin, for example on the sourcing of the ostrich feathers which graced the Viceroy's hat, to something a little more up to date, to wit the products Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) and Armadillorun (http://www.armadillorun.com/). I was pleased to learn that the former would solve my continuing difficulties with cropping images while I was impressed to learn that the latter, while being classed as a computer game, appeared to be genuinely instructional, a sort of construction toy, a bit like Meccano (see illustration above), but simulated on a computer rather than coming in the form of bits and bobs in a box. Google has lots of stuff about it. Further evidence that while the young may not read too much these days, they are not completely wasting their time.

We moved onto the important question of why Google do not vet the applications being sold to run on Android telephones, while the likes of Apple and Microsoft do vet the applications being sold to run on their devices. A question both important and interesting, whether or not the allegation is true, to which I ought to return on another occasion. And we closed with consideration of the price of a fancy electric guitar, which turned out to be very much the same as that of, for example, of a trumpet or a clarinet. Another interesting question, but one to which I shall probably not be returning.

Well, not quite closed. Before we broke up, we were treated to a short reading from the great book of the day, which one of our number had had the foresight to add to his trusty Kindle for the consideration of 36p, the first Kindle edition coming in rather cheaper than the first Book edition.