Incidentally, talking of Leonard Cohen....
Many years ago (must have been in the mid 1980's) Mrs hay-char and I were island-hopping in the Saronic Gulf. Just ourselves, a couple of backpacks and a few drachma. Our main treat most days was to go down to the waterfront of wherever we had got to and have a
frappé megala at a café or bar, looking out at the boats. We ended up in Hydra which is a stark, rocky but very beautiful island: very popular with the better off, as evidenced by the cost of eating out, and the names above the shops along the quayside. One morning, we were drinking our
frappés when we saw a curious procession consisting of several women (very attractive ones as I could tell, right up to the moment when I got a slap from Mrs h-c for checking

) clutching bunches of gladioli and escorting a tall, slim figure dressed all in black. There was something very familiar about him and, after a few minutes, we both realised that it must have been Laughing Len himself - he had a small place on Hydra and I think the photos on the back of the sleeve of "Songs From a Room" were taken there. Many years later I read an interview with him, where he talked about his house there and mentioned that he hadn't visited it for years: I think the occasion when we saw him must have been one of the last times he went to the Island.
I seem to have a gift for recognising idols of mine just after they disappear from sight. I was a great admirer of James Cameron (the late BBC and Guardian journalist, not the Director of "Titanic") and I had a holiday job working as a receptionist at a learned society. One evening he came in, accompanied by his wife who was an extremely attractive Indian woman. I was so busy staring at her (do you see a common thread here?

) that I only realised who he was as he left the place. Within two or three years he had died

.