You might not know it yet, and lock-down means your opportunity to explore it fully will be sadly limited when you do, but Thursday is the inaugural Gray Day, the first of what organisers hope will become a significant annual event celebrating the life, work and legacy of Alasdair Gray. The iconic author, illustrator, poet and artist died aged 85 in 2019 and the plan is for Gray Day eventually to assume the same stature as its sort-of-namesake, Bloomsday. Named for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s 1922 Modernist masterpiece Ulysses, it’s held in Dublin every June and sees Dubliners attend readings and enjoy street parties and pub crawls dressed as characters from the book. Aside from being a big tourist draw and driver of revenue, it’s taken very seriously as a cultural event: on Bloomsday in 1982, Irish broadcaster RTE marked the centenary of Joyce’s birth with a continuous 30-hour broadcast of the entire text of Ulysses.