Today, in various places around the world, men are dressing in bowler hats and suspenders, and women are wearing Edwardian-era dresses. The more sedate of them will drink tea at public readings; the more boisterous will eat kidneys and go on pub crawls, drinking Bass Ale. Why? Because today is Bloomsday!

Held to commemorate June 16th, 1904, the day on which the fictional events of James Joyce's novel Ulysses take place, Bloomsday is a celebration of Leopold Bloom and his wanderings and musings through Dublin. He eats breakfast, has a bath, goes to a funeral, eats a sandwich for lunch, meets up with some people drinking in a pub, and after some further digressions, ends up having a drunken conversation in the early hours of the morning with his surrogate son, Stephen Dedalus. In the meantime, his wife Molly is fooling around with Blazes Boylan, a local boxing manager and ladies' man.

A recent book, Ulysses and Us, by Declan Kiberd, is an attempt to wrest control of the novel's legacy from the esoteric, ivory-tower discussions of academics, and assert its relevance to the everyday life of ordinary men and women - the very sort of people whose existence the novel celebrates.

Kiberd has written that the novel "teaches us much about the world: how to cope with grief and loss; how to tell a joke and how not to tell a joke; how to be frank about death in the age of its denial; how to walk and think at the same time; how to purge sex of possessiveness; how the way people eat food can tell us who they really are."

Important lessons, all.

All very useful things.