LIFE
nerd running away from Montreal. It
does happen.
In Hydra you remember how awful
cars are, because it doesn’t have any.
They are banned. Instead, a small fleet
of donkeys stand on the quayside wait-
ing to carry the shopping up the hills,
should you lack a muse to do it for you.
Cohen knew he was accepted in Hydra
when the rubbish donkey — I mean
the donkey that collected rubbish —
called at his door. ‘It is like receiving
the Legion of Honour,’ he said.
The Pirate Bar (formerly called
O Peiratis) is a tourist café, in case
anyone thought it could ever be any-
thing else, which often hosted Cohen.
It is a simple white two-storey house
on the quayside, with shabby chairs
under grey and white awnings to
protect tourist heads. Inside there is
a bar — an alcoholics’ bar, the best
kind of bar. You could quietly drink
yourself to death here. It has that
kind of peace. They have written
‘The Pirate Bar’ on every conceiva-
ble surface. I like this. It is not redec-
orated to please passing billionaires
who arrive by yacht. I like this too.T
he Pirate Bar is an oddity, even
for this column: a bar and res-
taurant themed in homage to a
pirate, whom I consider to be generic,
and Leonard Cohen. It is in Hydra,
a three-hour boat ride from Piraeus,
and Cohen’s home in the 1960s with
his muse — this means unpaid female
servant who also provides sex — Mar-
ianne Ihlen. He bought a house on
the hill with an inheritance from his
grandmother. Thus are famous hip-
pies made — with inherited money.
Hydra is known as Leonard Cohen
Island. The locals don’t mind living on
Leonard Cohen Island. ‘Cohen?’ asked
a native, as I loitered on the steps of his
house on the hill. ‘He was my friend.’
The pharmacist was also his friend.
He told me how they drank together,
while I was buying Nicorette gum.
Hydra is not only famous for Leon-
ard Cohen, of course; it was mentioned
by Herodotus, was an important mar-
itime power in the 18th century, and
also hosted Princess Margaret. But
that is presumably less interesting than
being Leonard Cohen Island — for he
was that strange thing, a sexy Jewish
There is a lifesize, or perhaps
three-quarter-sized, pirate inside. He
is toothy and menacing. He looks like
a pirate of Penzance. He has only one
hand. There is a Leonard Cohen album
with his signature on the wall, so faded
as to seem ghostly — was he ever real-
ly here? — and a giant photo graph of
a tongue. There is also a photograph
of part of Eric Clapton. It includes his
guitar but misses out his head. I am not
sure Eric Clapton should be here. This
is Leonard Cohen Island. It is not Eric
Clapton Island.
The food is merely adequate, pre-
sumably because you can’t complain
about lazy food when you are on a
boat back to Piraeus. The chips are
generic, the chicken tastes somehow
tense. The Greek salad, though, is fab-
ulous, with lumps of cheese painted
with olive oil and tomatoes tasting as
they should; that is, ripe. English toma-
toes are hellish. I do not know why we
tolerate them.
If it were cynical, the Pirate Bar
would become the Leonard Cohen
Bar. It would play Leonard Cohen
songs and serve toasties named after
anxiety disorders. But it hasn’t done
this, either because it thinks no one
could eat while listening to Leonard
Cohen, or because it is attached to the
three-quarter-sized pirate with only
one hand, and if the Pirate Bar became
the Leonard Cohen Bar it would either
have to get rid of it or disguise it as
Leonard Cohen.
I think this would be impossible,
and a donkey — or a muse — would
have to carry it away.The Pirate Bar, Votsi, Idra 180 40,
Greece, tel: +30 2298 052711.Food
Lunchtime on Hydra
Tanya Gold
There is a
Leonard
Cohen album
with his
signature on
the wall, so
faded as to
seem ghostlyWhen Boris Johnson hit out
at ‘the doomsters and the
gloomsters’, I was willing to
believe that the word gloomster
existed. Well, it does now.
English abounds in elements
like the suffix -ster by which new
words may be generated. We
know without thinking about
it that words ending in -ster are
slightly derogatory. A rhymer is
romantic, and a rhymester vulgar.
Originally all -sters were
feminine. Before the Conquest,
a seamestre was a sempstress and
a bæcestre a baker. Among the
Anglo-Saxons, it seems those
trades were followed only by
women. Of medieval coinagesfor trade-pursuits, only spinster
survives as solely feminine in
application, although its meaning
has changed to ‘an unmarried
woman’ rather than ‘a spinner of
wool’; it is now pejorative too.
A doomster, one might think,
is ‘a prophet of doom’, probably
self-appointed. The Oxford
English Dictionary is ignorant of
that sense, not having fully revised
its entry for the word since 1897,
but lists it as an archaic name for
a judge, a variant of deemster ordempster. The latter, of course,
came into use as a surname, the
best known holder being Nigel
Dempster, that strange gossip
columnist (1941-2007). Deemster
in the Isle of Man is the title of
a judge.
Since the -ster suffix is so
transparent, it is easy to see that
a gloomster is analogous to the
doomster. Gloom and glum are
variants of the same word, but
are apparently unrelated to the
gloaming of twilight. Shakespeare
wrote of ‘gloomy woods’, but
it was not until 1947 that the
doublet which inspired Boris
Johnson — doom and gloom —
came into being.It featured in Finian’s
Rainbow, which was a smash hit
musical on Broadway but clocked
up only 55 performances when
it came to the Palace Theatre
in London. In 1968, however, it
was made into a film, which I bet
Mr Johnson has seen.
I find Fred Astaire as an
Irishman and Tommy Steele as a
leprechaun slightly embarrassing,
but in any case, Astaire, as Finian
McLonergan, asks: ‘What has
Ireland to live for now? Answer
me that!’ Steele, as Og replies:
‘Doom and gloom. Doooom
and gloooom.’ Thus it was that
Og adumbrated the prophets of
Project Fear. — Dot WordsworthMIND YOUR LANGUAGE
Gloomster‘Must be the same thing they’re using on Brexit.’