Stephen Herrick

So I really wanted to go there just to see, you know, to pay homage to George Johnston, to be honest, for somebody who had been a great influence on myself as a youngster.

But everyone is, you know, overwhelmed by the romance of taking off and living on a Greek island for 10 years.

So I wanted to see what that was like.

to see what Hydra was like.

I mean, obviously it's very different in 2019 than what it was in 2000, sorry, 1960.

But it is a beautiful island, as Polly Sansom points out in the book, with some beautiful writing.

An awful lot.

There's the characters themselves, books, which I've mentioned, Charmian's two books there on the Greek islands.

There's been numerous biographies.

There's been a recent film released about Marianne and Lennon-Cohen

And there's been a recent book called Half the Perfect World, Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955 to 1964, which explores this very same territory.

They're kind of like our F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, aren't they, really?

Or they're becoming like that.

Yeah, it was, look, I think she did a wonderful job of setting the scenes.

and letting us sit with Erica as she talked to Charmian and Lennon Cohen and Axel, sorry, Marianne and Marianne's husband, Axel Jensen.

But it kept, it did keep, I felt like I was intruding a lot of the time in the real life of these people or the memory of these people.

For example, my George doesn't say Struth and my Leonard doesn't,

ruffle the hair of a 17-year-old girl.

So I sometimes winced at those sorts of things.

That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah.