Salivating for a feed on fantasy island

Mungo was reportedly a fleeting member of the much-eulogised Bohemian set which laid claim to the Aegean outcrop during the '50s and '60s.

The rustic island's cultural credentials are as swoon-worthy as its narrow and vertiginous cobbled streets, which, save for the odd garbage truck, dictate transportation remains strictly equine.

For those who fetishise (certain) times past and (certain) artsy mythologies, all those black-and-white photos of Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift rubbing shoulders with the likes of Leonard Cohen as he strums a guitar under an olive tree verge on the pornographic.

The images seem to capture long-lost joie de vivre fused with a creativity hot-housed, as if vine-ripened tomatoes, under the Mediterranean sun. It's all austere authenticity and stripped-down devotion to craft.

Cohen zealots, in particular, are still drawn to Hydra to walk those same paths the Canadian singer/songwriter took as he composed such classics as So Long, Marianne and Bird on a Wire. They visit the villa in which he stayed, they lay tributes (tea and oranges) at his door.

It's easy to view the period through rose-coloured glasses, although there was a dark side to the lifestyle gamble for Johnston and Clift, "Australia's Ted and Sylvia".

Their expat experience on Hydra (ironically a "dry" island to which water is delivered) was a simmering maceration of illness and impecunity as much as it was brave and productive. Johnston called it for what it was by naming the 1969 sequel to the seminal My Brother Jack, Clean Straw for Nothing, (clean straw being where you sleep off a hangover) and something Cohen acknowledged when he said of the self-exiled Aussies who took him under their wing: "They drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more, they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration."

With a beer in hand and in the reverie of a Sunday afternoon on the veranda before those daydreams are laid to waste by the realities of a Sunday evening, my wife and I are prone to fantasising about a trip to Hydra, maybe even pulling off a penny-pinching house swap.

Putting aside the obvious inequity of such a concept (why on Earth would someone exchange a European seaside paradise for a landlocked shack in the Australian bush?), I like the idea because, in that rather gross fanboy way, I'd really like to see where all those (ancient and modern) myths and legends were born, even though the place is surely a tourist trap.

More B. R. Doherty

While by no means a Johnston disciple, for some reason his Meredith trilogy still rattles around the halls of my phone and, during idle moments (which these days seem to amount to about three a year), I scroll through his prose, always a sucker for chapters titled something like Greece, 1959.

I returned to this activity just a week ago when the family - feeling the urge to farewell our very first summer holidays together - mounted a day trip to our own slice of the Saronic Islands barely an hour from home.

The beach, with it slippery rock platforms and gentle azure waters, is no secret (these days, nothing is) but it's sufficiently isolated to deter most visitors because you have to leave the car behind and walk about 20 minutes to get there.

We're truly blessed to have access to such places, a refrain in my sloshing ears as I revisited Johnston's Hydra days up on the sand while our phocine children gambolled about the unpatrolled ocean in front of my baking legs.

We were all ravenous by the time we made it back to the ute and, wanting this rare time together to linger, we decided to shell out for an early dinner, and, what's more, do so with a spur-of-the-moment, sit-down meal in an actual restaurant. We didn't take the decision lightly because we'd made a loose pact this summer to avoid paying for unnecessary food.

Over the years, we've filled our first-world stomachs with viatic sugar, salt and lard peddled by the conglomerates of coagulation but, these summer holidays, it's been homemade sandwiches and tap water up and down the highways, saving us money and that indefinable 'sick' feeling 10 minutes after an ill-judged injection of American cheese.

But, based on the price per dish, if not presentation, our below-average meal following our above-average beach excursion certainly wasn't fast food, it was "restaurant quality", provided, that is, "restaurant quality" equates to desultory greens and necromanced flesh quivering spookily on a greasy plate, as if the product of a Ouija board rather than a frying pan.

All so very disappointing and, sadly, something to which we've become inured.

Again, a first-world problem, but there's nothing quite as depressing as spending good money on a bad meal and my wife and I actually exchanged glances of "pregret" before being seated, somehow knowing we were about to do our dough.

Of course, just like the diners in the Waldorf Salad episode of Fawlty Towers, when the time came to answer the inevitable question from our hard-working waitress - How was your meal? - we said "Great, thanks", paid our large bill and fled the scene of the crime, unable to shake the feeling our last supper, even (perhaps a tad melodramatically), our entire summer, had been ruined by a substandard death-row dinner.

Driving home, I thought about George Johnston and Charmian Clift and Leonard Cohen and how their time on Hydra might well have been poverty stricken, but I bet they never experienced a meal as lacklustre and exploitative as the one to which our own family had just been subjected.

I remembered, too, how in Clean Straw for Nothing, the love-triangle thespian, Archie Calverton, with "the big sensual mouth and the spiky tangle of hair" is based on Peter Finch, the actor who won a posthumous Oscar for playing evangelist anchorman Howard Beale in 1976's Network.

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Finch's Beale famously bellowed.

I knew how Beale felt and my wife must have been feeling the same way, too, because a couple of days later, in a first for our family, she sent a complaint to the restaurant, which, to its credit, promptly refunded our money.

Sometimes summer is worth fighting for.