Dylan's blues

The poet Dylan Thomas famously wrote that people should "rage against the dying of the light" when approaching death.

BBC2 marked the centenary of Thomas' birth last night with a drama about his own final days in New York, where he died aged 39 in 1953, allegedly after drinking eighteen whiskies in the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village. Although I haven't been to the White Horse, I have walked past the Chelsea Hotel where he collapsed after his supposed alcoholic bout.

Tom Hollander, who played Thomas, apparently had to put on two stone to play the role and he did look quite like him but his performance reminded me somewhat of Chuck Berry's remark to the Rolling Stones when they recorded at Chess Studios in Chicago: "You nearly got it." I'm also not sure why an Englishman was cast as Thomas when there are plenty of Welsh actors who could have played the role such as the superb impressionist Michael Sheen.

Finnegans Wake

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

I'm now just under half way through Finnegans Wake, James Joyce's final novel, of which the above is both the end of the first and beginning of the last sentence, separated by a little over six hundred pages of – many would say unreadable – prose.

I'm not going to say that Finnegans Wake is an easy book to read – although Harold Pinter once claimed, somewhat dubiously, to have finished it without any problem as a sixth former – nor that there haven't been moments, especially in the first couple of chapters, when I haven't been tempted to give up on it. So why haven't I?

For one thing, Finnegans Wake with its puns and jokes ("flushpots of Euston and the hanging garments of Marylebone", "peats be with them", "boy fiend") can be very funny, especially the encounter between an Irishman and an invading Dane in the first chapter. As for long passages that seem bewildering when you first read them, I'd say two things. Firstly, as Joyce himself said to a young reader, it's possible to enjoy the flow of the language, the layers of legend, historical and literary allusions and the images they create without fully understanding their meaning: one of the fun things about Finnegans Wake is that nearly every sentence has multiple possible meanings and your own interpretation of them is as valid as anyone else's, although unlike some, mainly American, reading groups (over)analysing them, I plan to finish the book in a month to six weeks rather than a year or more. Also, it helps if you have some knowledge of Irish language and literature – Finnegan for instance refers to both the music hall song Finnegan's Wake, in which a hod carrier comes back to life after being splashed with whiskey at his wake, as well as Finn MacCool, the mythological hero also destined to rise again –  read what others have written about the book before you start, use a guide to it (I've found this one quite useful) and make notes as you go along.

Like Ulysses, Finnegans Wake also has plenty of references to pubs – the main character is a Dublin landlord called Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker – and beer, including Allsopp's, Guinness and Reid's family stout. I've a feeling I may reward myself with a drop when I become one of the few to finish it...

Back to Macc

I went on a pub crawl around Macclesfield this weekend.

I don't think I've been to Macclesfield since I used to change trains there travelling between Stoke and Stockport as a student twenty or so years ago. In the early 90's, its pubs were mainly tied houses of Robinson's Brewery in nearby Stockport and a few owned by Manchester brewers Boddingtons and Holt's. That's changed in the last decade or so as microbreweries Bollington, RedWillow and Storm have all opened up in or near the town.

Following a map produced by the local CAMRA branch, we started in the Castle Inn, a pub whose architectural features have led to it being listed on the National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors. The good thing about this crawl is that – contrary to how it might appear on the map – the pubs are actually pretty close together, and to the station; there is also a good balance of "pubby" pubs, including street-corner locals like the Jolly Sailor and Waters Green Tavern, and more modern specialist beer bars such as the Treacle Tap and Snow Goose  which give Sunderland Street the feel of a mini-Mancunian Northern Quarter. Although it's not on the map, we also managed to find the new RedWillow brewery tap whose draught beers include their distinctive, Bamberg-style smoked porter.

As someone once said, I shall return.

Cheese and whisky

I had one of those moments the other day – I suppose you could call it an epiphany if you wanted to be a bit pretentious – where something unexpectedly clicks in your head

Cheese and whisky. Without really planning to, I had a glass of whisky with some cheese and was surprised how well they go together. I suppose I shouldn't have been given that sweet things – Branston pickle, picalilli and other chutneys – are often served with cheese.

Pub of the Year

I went to the presentation of the Stockport and South Manchester Pub of the Year award to the Hope Inn in Stockport last night.

I voted for the Hope so was pleased when it won the award. At the top of the so-called Stockport Slope, it is Stockport's only brewpub, although the Magnet and – I learnt last night – the Crown are also in the process of building breweries on their premises. If things go to plan, it looks like Heaton Lane and Wellington Road North might soon be rivalling the Black Country for pubs brewing their own beer.

A walk on the mild side

I went on a CAMRA-organised crawl of pubs selling cask mild in Stockport on Friday night.

As you'd expect, quite a bit of the cask mild we drank was Robinson's, now called 1892, and I'm glad to say that with one exception, swiftly replaced and taken off sale, it was all in good condition. The non-Robbies houses we went to, the Railway, Crown and Magnet, also had some decent milds, most of them dark ones like Copper Dragon Black Gold and All Gates All Black. On the subject of colour, if the appropriately named Black Country is the heartland of dark mild, the Manchester area must still rank as the top producer of light mild with Hydes and Robinson's leading the way.

I'm also happy to report that most of the pubs were pretty busy, especially the ones on the Stockport beer slope that is now Wellington Road North.

Manchester Beer Festival

Having been to most incarnations of CAMRA's National Winter Ales Festival in Manchester over the last fifteen years, from the first one at Upper Campfield Market in Castlefield in 1999 to the ones at the East Germany circa 1960 New Century Hall, I was looking forward to the Manchester Beer and Cider Festival at Manchester Velodrome, the replacement post-Christmas drinking get together now the NWAF has moved to Derby.

The first thing to say is how impressive a venue the Velodrome is. I've seen it before on TV but that doesn't give you any idea of how high and steep the track really is. I reckon I'd struggle to get round one lap of it, never mind the dozens the professionals do. I know some disabled drinkers had problems accessing the bar area in the middle of the track but as far as I could see the volunteer stewards did everything they could to work round that, taking people down to it by lift and putting extra seating there, and one plus of the Velodrome is that trams stop pretty much outside the front door.

I went to the first session on Wednesday afternoon and the last one on Saturday. The stand out beers for me on the first day were the cask version of Fuller's 1845 Strong Ale and the dangerously drinkable 6.5% Elland 1872 Porter, interspersed with a few halves of Robinson's Old Tom. Unsurprisingly they had all run out by the last session, as did the rest of the beer by about three o'clock, something reflected in free admission for CAMRA members and a reduced entry price of £1 for non-members. Like most people we headed back into town on the tram and went to a pub in the Northern Quarter, the beer shortage at the Velodrome providing a windfall for a number of city centre hostelries.