Dublin Cityguide

Today you can take a Joyce tour, following the footsteps of Bloom over his fictitious 24-hour pub-crawl round this intriguing city. In fact writers and drink figure a lot in this town. A good place to start if you're of a literary proud possessor of the 8th century Book of Kells. This wonderful illuminated manuscript with its mythic animals and sinuous capitals is opened at a different illuminated page every day, so whenever you go you will see something different. Step out of these old 16th century halls and into the modern thoroughfare known as Grafton Street. After gazing so hard into the miniature past you'll have to adjust your eyes to the bright glitzy modernity of Dublin's downtown. Star-watch as tax-exile pop icons trip down the street along with more homegrown products like Bono and Bob Geldof.

For Dublin's fair city everything goes from high culture to high camp. Let's not forget that this is where Oscar Wilde and his eccentric mother wandered the streets in their ostentatious outfits, his mother spouting old Irish verse with Oscar interjecting cutting remarks in his crystal-tipped English. Oscar's flamboyance and his love of the good things in life is something that modern Dubliners have inherited. Take a ride down to the sea and try Dublin Bay prawns washed down with one of the hundreds of beers on offer. The craggy coast with its wild seas makes a surprising contrast to the smart Georgian squares that adorn the inner city. It is the mix of extreme sophistication set in a wild landscape that makes Dublin so appealing.

The city has become very smart and expensive in recent years, it has become a place to live and be seen in, and media people and musicians from all over Europe either have houses there or regularly visit the city. Shabby houses which were once home to the huge, hungry Joyce family - James's father regularly forced the family to make impromptu midnight flits when he had drunk the money for the rent - are now desirable residences for the city's elite. Old rotting Georgian rows with their appalling plumbing, so well described by the American Irish writer J.P. Donleavy, have all been done up and sit winking in the Irish sun for anyone with enough money to buy them.

Any tourist publication or ad on Ireland will reiterate ad nauseam how friendly and welcoming its people are, but the fact is, it's true. Ask a Dubliner directions and ten to one you'll end up being taken there. Ask someone to recommend a good local brew and you'll probably end up under the table a few hours later the best of friends. When it comes to pubs you'll have to do your own research: every connoisseur has their own idea about which side of the River Liffey the best pubs can be found on. You'll simply have to take to the streets and make your own odyssey to find out. The river runs through the heart of the city like a streak of ink: with most of Dublin's historic monuments to the south but with a literary edge to the north where you will find the Irish Writers Museum and the Abbey Theatre, where the leafy hills of Buda are preferable to the flat, teeming boulevards, of Pest: in Dublin locals vie over the smart malls in the south and the tattier, but perhaps racier, streets in the north.

Whiskey, the "water of life" as it is known in Irish, is celebrated to the north of the city at the Irish Whiskey Corner on Bow Street where you can take a tour to discover the important difference between Irish whiskey and Scotch, as well as sample about five different varieties. Not far from here, horses, another traditional part of Irish life, are sold every first Sunday of the month at the cobbled market of Smithfield. People come from miles around to sell their stock and run their animals through the streets to show off their gait and condition. No end of money changes hands, with drinks all round if a good deal has been made.

Our Hungarian hero Bloom, however, was not so partisan. He crossed the Rubicon several times on that immortal night, recalling the delights of the greatest bender in fiction without betraying a preference for either river bank. But just one word of warning for those who might wish to follow his labyrinthine rambling: Joyce himself frequently glimpsed the cold light of dawn from the hard, damp bed of the gutter!