Holidays are for selfies, oddities, photos of food, drinks, pebbles, water and feet. The photos created in your head before you get on the plane often never happen because, in the way of holidays, your destination is at least part fantasy, part expectation and part surprise. Before leaving, you spend more time thinking about which camera to take than deciding what underwear to pack. Then you worry about it being stolen, or dropped into the deep blue sea, left in a bar, or weighing as much as the rest of your luggage. So you leave it at home anyway. Good decision.
Maybe holidays should be more a time to write, or at least to read books by people who write very well about the place where you are staying, and in a way that creates thousands of images in the mind, without lifting more than the sun cream. Such a writer is Charmian Clift.
She and her husband George Johnston lived on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1950’s. His work includes the novel My Brother Jack, set in Melbourne, Australia, after the First World War. Her writing includes the memoir Peel Me A Lotus, about their life on Hydra. They were poor, as the royalties came and went, but life rich. A friend advised me to read the book before going to Hydra and it was good advice. It has sentences that stay in my mind more vividly than any photo could even fractionally reach.
There are photographs of that time, when Hydra was the place to be for writers, painters and most famously, Leonard Cohen, who arrived in 1960. The photojournalist James Burke took more than 1500 photographs on Hydra that year for an unpublished story for Life magazine. Most of them are shots of the Bohemian colony at work, and play. Some are of Cohen and his Norwegian girlfriend Marianne Ihlen, as in So Long Marianne.
Leonard Cohen would later write about Charmian and George that they: “… drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more, they blessed more … they were an inspiration.” Today, the wall of their old house is cloaked with a vivid pink bougainvillea and hopefully the house now has better plumbing. But like everywhere, Hydra has moved on.
So, you lay out your beach towel, and you have an iPhone to take hundreds of photos, if necessary. It’s the camera in your pocket, as they say. I went to three Greek islands last year, with an iPhone, and it can do extraordinary things with minimal thought or effort. I recommend the Portrait setting for photographing alcoholic drinks. Go in the spring and take many photos of flowers. And cats. So here are a few shots I took on that island holiday, and I’m going back with the iPhone, of course, and perhaps just one small camera. And books.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F80526e8d-b650-432d-ac41-1e97f9bcf3a6_2407x3370.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F72f027c8-ffb9-4709-ac24-da88b14b1664_3024x4032.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffdc7e493-ad3b-45b5-947b-e5bf443be244_3024x4032.jpeg)
Thank you for visiting and have a good holiday!
(All photos by the author except Charmian Clift which was taken by Frederick Stanley Grimes and is courtesy of the NSW State Library and ACP Magazines Ltd).
Intriguing Greek mysteries and delights shared with eloquence. Thank you Simon.
Sheltering in another coffee shop from Londons second thunderstorm I am finding it hard to be as delighted with your wonderful shots and delightful writing as I might have been.