Member-only story

Help, an Irish Author Is Stalking Me

…and as a result, I destroy a beginning romance

Jay Vaananen
4 min readJan 29, 2024
Source: Author’s own collection

“I’ve seen him before somewhere,” I said as I noticed the portrait on the wall.

I was in London for business and soon found myself in my natural habitat — a pub.

I kept wondering who the man in the portrait was. Then, like an old Mercedes diesel engine, the machinery in my middle-aged mind started turning. It took about the same time for my brain to go through the gears as it took for the bartender to pour and place the glass of amber nectar in front of me.

“Is that James Joyce?” I asked, wiping the froth from my whiskers and pointing at the portrait of the bespectacled man wearing a snazzy hat.

“I don’t know, although many people have asked me who that is,” he replied.

“Let’s find out shall we?” I said, ignoring the fact that if many people had already asked him and he hadn’t bothered to find out, then perhaps he wasn’t the least bit interested in the artwork adorning the walls of his place of employment.

I grabbed my phone, Googled “James Joyce portrait” and tapped on “Images”.

Boom.

There he was, the same picture as the cover of an old version of Ulysses, the tome I am currently struggling to…

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Jay Vaananen
Jay Vaananen

Written by Jay Vaananen

Communications executive and writer. Have humour, will write.

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