Once again Wild June had me racing towards London with a book to promote. I was reading Ulysses as the train rattled south and west from Norfolk: the following day was June 16: Bloomsday: the day on which the fictional action of Ulysses takes place, and on which those who love the book will raise a glass to James Joyce, the great man who wrote the damn thing.
That day I was to join the wonderful Cerys Matthews on her Sunday morning show on BBC Radio 6 to talk about Ulysses: and if there was time, a polite mention of my own latest offering. So I read the Sirens chapter, prose in the form of music, and I marked a paragraph – in which Bloom, taking late lunch in a pub, listens to a beautifully sung song of lost love – to read to Cerys.
Odd, in a way: Ulysses is the most urban of novels. Not a great birder Joyce: being more than half blind didn’t help. Ipswich: we stopped, doors slammed, we moved on. I read on, another song ringing out from the Ormond Hotel on the banks of the Liffey. Manningtree next stop.
And then we crossed the Stour, a shining stretch of estuarine mud, snakes of grey water reflecting grey cloud, all of it freckled white with the white of the birds: mostly gulls of course, but also a swan or two.
And then with a sudden jump of emotion — a little like the one that Bloom experienced when listening to the song — an egret: lithe and graceful and gorgeous: filling me with joy and perhaps a little sadness too…
…high, resplendent, aflame, crowned high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation, everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness…
The last bit I read on the programme, for it is, of course, Joyce. Then Cerys read part of the Molly Bloom soliloquy, so beautifully I am now convinced that Molly is Welsh, not Irish…
…. I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours spraining up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is…
And then she — Cerys, not Molly — was kind enough to mention my book as well: On the Marsh: A Year Surrounded by Wildness and Wet, with contributions from Edmund Barnes.
Never mind your egret, whether little or cattle, down in Devon, visiting friends, and with them at RSPB Bowling Green & Goosemoor reserve when up pops a spoonbill, going potty swishing its beak through the shallow scrapes and dashing after the fish and crustaceans it was disturbing. We (all four of us) were entranced – hardly surprising really!
First confirmed sighting of same: last time (with the same friends), the possible spoonbill was at the limits the binoculars could reach and we all thought it was such (this was at the Huleh Reserve in Northern Israel – Simon, you really do need to go there there sometime!) and we weren’t sure.
This time, no doubt (I’ll even send you a photo if you like).
Bloom Day! I’d forgotten that. And I’d forgotten 16th June is Sussex Day, too. (My home county, now). I’d taken the train (trains, slowish) across the south to my father in Somerset with Wm Cobbet’s Rural Rides as a very suitable companion. But, damn me! I’ve got my copy of Ulysses there somewhere, in a spare room, unread for years. If only I’d known . . . and Molly. How wonderful!
No, Simon, the Molly Bloom soliloquy? convinces me that Molly is Irish, can you not hear the accent when you read it, maybe it is because I spent the first 16 years in Birkenhead, with the occasional Sunday going to Breck Rd. to visit my paternal grand parents.