Music critic Kitty Empire in Springfield Park, Stamford Hill, London. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer
Let's be honest – the notion of summer as an extended golden period of rest and re-stimulation really now only applies to the young, the retired, or those in the teaching professions. The rest of us slog on, hoping to catch the odd festival (or maybe just gig in a park), marking time until camping in Cornwall or fly-drive to France, where finally luxuriating in the latest Alan Hollinghurst will come a distant second to stopping the youngest weeing in the hotel pool.
Once, though, I was artfully feckless too, making the rent by working as an usher for the Royal Shakespeare Company. "Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Barbican theatre for this evening's performance of Henry IV, Part 1," I used to say over the public address system in the summer of '92, before getting the ice creams ready for the interval. Sometimes, I got to watch: Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew. The free Bard stopped when I was promoted to stage doorkeeper, where I deepened my appreciation for the theatre by learning that many of our finest actors are nice to lower-order factotums (Dame Judi, Emily Watson, take a bow); while many are not.
That long summer, though, hot- and cold-running Shakespeare on tap could not compete with the first Spiritualized album, Lazer Guided Melodies. Released in March, it never left my turntable till the autumn – cued up first thing in the morning, soothing me to sleep last thing at night. All other music – even garage on pirate radio – faded into insignificance in that special iteration of OCD that music fans will ruefully recognise. Jason Pierce's previous band (Spacemen 3) had a bootleg album called Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To; his Lazer Guided Melodies subbed magnificently for the opiates I was too responsible to take myself.
Playing something over and over is a given if you are a music fan, but there is something about the repeated listens of summer – the way they sound in the garden, turned up loud to educate the neighbours; the way they go with light nights and burnt shoulders – that sears them into your affections. This summer, I will be hoiking Hollinghurst around, and reading up on standing stones in Julian Cope's Megalithic European in advance of our trip to Carnac. The vorticists exhibition at Tate Britain is still there, beckoning, awaiting time without other calls upon it. There is no one album of summer. Those gilded levels of monomania don't usually withstand the transition from shared rented accommodation. We are so much more fickle now, dipping in and out of African stuff, a soon-to-be-issued lost Screaming Trees album, Hal Willner's Rogue's Gallery compilation of piratical songs and the one album in the car that everyone can agree on: Lykke Li's Wounded Rhymes.
Wild Strawberries starring Bibi Andersson and Ingmar Bergman. Photograph: SNAP/Rex Features
I have a special affection for a sad little film of the early 70s in which middle-aged housewife Joanne Woodward, partly prompted by seeing Bergman's Wild Strawberries, spends her time remembering and regretting aspects of her life. It's called Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams and maybe it's the circular, double-edged title that gets to me. It suggests a lifetime of springs spent making plans for the summer that are never quite fulfilled, and are then reviewed in the winter when fresh dreams keep the carousel of life hopefully turning. However, I did once pull off a perfect summer exactly 60 years ago in a burst of energy I've been trying to capture ever since.
In June 1951, having completed my Higher School Certificate exams (the predecessor of A-levels), I embarked on an ambitious cultural journey in anticipation of spending two fallow years in the army before going to university. I hitchhiked from Bristol to London, my first visit there on my own, and stayed for a week with friends of my parents in Croydon. I went to the theatre eight times in six days, and on the seventh day, instead of resting, I saw Max Ophuls' wittily erotic film La Ronde at the Curzon, a luxurious cinema like none I'd previously seen. The plays included Alec Guinness in Hamlet, Ralph Richardson in The Three Sisters and Paul Scofield in Ring Round the Moon. The whole theatrical experience cost ?1.
I went to the National Gallery and the Tate for the first time, which were, of course, free, and toured the South Bank site of the Festival of Britain, which was an exhilarating view of a post-austerity future. Before leaving home I'd bought a set of 10 paperbacks by Evelyn Waugh, simultaneously published that month by Penguin. I devoured them one after the other, Brideshead Revisited putting me in the mood for both the army and for Oxford.
I've never had a summer quite like that again, though I've never given up trying, and I've spent the past 52 summers in Sweden with my Swedish wife and half-Swedish children working on a succession of books and radio programmes, and churning out God knows how many articles and reviews, all of which seemed significant at the time. The most strenuous summer was 1988 when, as a Booker prize judge, I had 105 novels to negotiate. I set out to read at least one a day for the month I was in the Swedish countryside. It gave my July and August a sense of purpose. I got up at four each morning, aiming to deal with a shortish book before breakfast, and then set about The Satanic Verses, a three-day assignment. Because I'd agreed to write an article for the Observer on the taxonomy of current literary fiction I jotted down the cars the characters drove, where they spent their vacations, and so on. This led me to note that "the most cherished middle-class household object appears to be the Aga cooker, mentioned in at least nine books". It was, however, a reader of the piece and not myself (the article was headed "The great fiction Aga-bargy") who jumped in and coined the term Aga saga.
Attentive readers will have inferred from my recent month's absence that I've already had my 2011 summer vacation. So how well did I spend my time? Wisely, I didn't take Proust this time, so I can still only say, as Sam Goldwyn did of The Wizard of Oz, that I've read part of A la recherche all the way through. I struggled with three academic works of film history for a longish essay in the TLS and read an enjoyable collection of American film criticism for a review in Sight & Sound. Blue Monday, the latest psychological thriller by Nicci French, the joint nom de guerre of my eldest son and his wife, gave me great pleasure, and I caught up with Freakonomics, which proved to be smug and disappointing. My biggest job of the summer was going through the index of all the movies I've reviewed over the past 48 years to make an anthology of some 150 of them. Memory Lane has never seemed more deeply rutted.
Four days from the end of my time in Sweden, I suddenly realised that once again I'd forgotten to read the complete plays of Shakespeare. So I read at random King John, which I'd last seen in 1974 in John Barton's much-edited RSC production. What a remarkable play it is. How bizarre the first act in which Falconbridge establishes his illegitimacy and thus his royal lineage. I'd forgotten the rousing last three lines: "Come the three corners of the world in arms, /And we shall shock them: nought shall make us rue,/If England to itself do rest but true."."
So now I'm back home, with Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes still unread in my bag. No country's newspapers have obituaries like ours and I'm catching up with those I've missed, the chief one being that of the great Swedish cinematographer Gunnar Fischer, who shot Bergman's The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night and Wild Strawberries. He shaped my vision of the unique quality of Swedish light, and died last month aged 100.
Three big attractions appeared in my absence and are at the top of my list to catch up with: the Magritte exhibition in Liverpool, Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life and Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Stranger's Child. They're three good reasons to stick around for the rest of the summer.
This summer, instead of sending postcards, I shall be writing about them. For years, I've collected old cards: faded pictures of storms in south coast resorts and winsome beauties popping out of bathing huts, inscribed in curling script to a Sybil from her aunt, or with sad and saucy lines from lovers. What began as a desultory pastime has turned into a minor obsession, and is now about to become a book.
I've been meaning for ages to spruce up and expand my collection of theatrical cards: I keep sending particularly teasing items. But I've been too busy looking at plays. That will change this season. No blameless specimen will be safe from my grasp. I'll be rushing through art exhibitions in order to get to the card shop and hauling friends across the road to a junk shop which may have a bundle of eloquent examples. Still, my main excursion will be to a shop in the centre of London commanded by an inspired collector of theatrical memorabilia. The one room, stacked high with books and dusty brown boxes, is organised like a garden shed: apparently haphazard, it's actually a miracle of arcane categorisation.
My aim will be to do what I've never managed before and spend the best part of a day there. I'll be seeking out examples of the midget postcard series (each about the size of a fag packet) featuring brown close-ups of Edwardian actresses: Violet Vanbrugh with her cloud of dark hair and glittering ear-rings; Edna May looking peevish under a hat like a cake; Marie Studholme flirting over her fan with a look of Penelope Wilton. I'm hoping to find some dramatic scenes along the lines of the one I have from If I Were King, which shows an enthroned George Alexander gracefully attended by minions in tights and armour; he's reading a letter which proclaims: "You are the Castor and Pollux of purity." And I'll be trying to winkle out some playbill posters, to go alongside the picture I have of a sad-eyed woman with out of control hair who is sitting, floppy handed, at a manual sewing machine, under the title: "The Girl Who Took the Wrong Turning".
An opulent room in The Wallace Collection, London. Photograph: Alex Segre/Alamy
As a child I had problem teeth. Once every few months I had to travel from our house in Sussex to London for sessions with a quietly spoken man in Harley Street. I'd go up in the train with my father, he doing the Times crossword, me contemplating the ordeal ahead. Sometimes there would just be the scream of the drill and the smell of burning dentine, sometimes there would be anaesthetic gas and extractions. It was all unspeakably ghastly, and when it was over, and I had staggered out of the chair, my mouth sour with blood and oil of cloves, my father would take me to an art gallery to recover.
The Wallace Collection in Manchester Square is an easy walk from Harley Street, and at some point in my dental evolution I developed a taste for 18th-century French painting – Lancret, Pater, Fragonard and the rest. I longed to occupy the green Arcadia of their imagination. A place in which classical statuary was half concealed by the billowing branches of trees, wood nymphs lolled in a state of undress, and no dentists or anaesthetists roamed.
The master of this genre was Antoine Watteau, and the collection has one of the dreamiest and most atmospheric of his paintings, Les Champs-Elysees. In the foreground a lone spectator surveys a sensual late-summer scene, in which four young women recline on the grass. Their hair is braided, their dresses are silk, and their attitudes languorous. This foursome is attended by only one gallant, and one of their number looks out of the canvas with a look of cool invitation, an invitation that the lone spectator appears to be considering. Surmounting a fountain above him, as if embodying his thought process, is a suggestively naked statue of Antiope, an Amazon queen. But our spectator also sees three small children playing in the grass, a reminder that lovemaking has its consequences.
So he stands there, indecisive. In the background is a sunlit field, and at its edge, shadowed woodland in which other couples dance and flirt. The spectator will never make his move, and that summer will never end. And that's why I come back to it, year after year. Because my summers do end. Some years, like this one, they don't even start. That said, I do still have my own teeth.
August is the month that Simon Mayo and I hand over the reins of our 5 Live film review show to Floyd and Boyd and take a few weeks respite from our continual on-air bickering. Significantly, we go our separate ways: Simon goes east to Suffolk, I head south-west to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.
Some years ago I shot a documentary about Sam Peckinpah's "West Country western" Straw Dogs on location around the village of St Buryan, which used locals as extras, and still draws movie tourists today. For years, the video of Straw Dogs was banned in the UK, but apparently it was always available to rent from St Buryan's local shop. Cornwall is full of cinema history, and also boasts a thriving offbeat cinema scene; check out Screen 7 at the Regal cinema in Redruth, a luxury licensed auditorium with plush seats and ample leg room, accessed via a stairwell labelled "Stairway to 7".
Whatever the weather, a primary occupation in Cornwall is surfing – a recreation which has boomed in the years since the British surf pic Blue Juice was seen as little more than a joke. Nowadays, the surfing beaches are packed, with surf documentaries and locally produced "board shorts" regularly projected in the local cafes and bars. Apparently, anyone can surf, but the instructor who first taught my then eight-year-old daughter took one look at me and said: "I can get her up on a board in a morning – you'd take a month." So my job is to stand in the sea in a wetsuit, looking like a fat sea lion for hours on end, making sure the waves don't get the better of my kids, and waiting for my feet to go numb.
Other Cornish wonders include Trebah Gardens, with its jungle valley etched down to the sea; the Eden Project, whose giant geodesic domes always remind me of my favourite science-fiction film, Silent Running; and the beach at Marazion, from which (at low tide) you can walk out to the medieval castle at St Michael's Mount, which featured in the somewhat silly Brit horror pic Revelation. There's also the Minack theatre, an extraordinary arena carved into the side of a rock face which presents spectacularly tempestuous productions, best viewed at sundown with a thunderstorm brewing over the sea behind.
At some point, we take the brief helicopter ride to Scilly, first to luscious St Mary's (Harold Wilson's respite from politics), and then on the boat to St Martin's (empty white beaches and a world-famous bakery) and edge-of-the-world St Agnes (last stop before Bishop Rock, which you might have seen on that BBC ident). I remember reviewing Joanna Hogg's acclaimed Britpic Archipelago, in which a fractured family spend a month in Tresco, indulging their complex emotional problems and generally having a terribly dysfunctional time, despite the spectacular scenery. Many critics loved the movie. Personally I admired it, but spent much of the running time figuring out how much it would cost to rent that jaw-dropping house and wondering why the hell I should sympathise with anyone who could whinge and complain while holidaying in one of the most beautiful places on earth. Honestly, if you can't be happy in Scilly, you should just give up. Maybe that was the point.
One of Kensington Palace Gardens's many impressive houses. Photograph: Ray Tang/Rex Features
Night walks shape my summer. One in particular: the half-sprinted dash, music still ringing in my ears, from the Royal Albert Hall to Notting Hill Gate, where I catch a bus home. I may do it, depending on weather, two dozen times between July and September. The BBC Proms have been the backbone to all my summers since childhood, first listening, then attending and eventually reviewing. What, as music critic, do I do in summer? I prom. What did I do when I wasn't a critic? I prommed.
My route, the quickest after dark, takes me along Kensington Palace Gardens, "billionaires' row", the half-mile-long avenue built on crown estate lands in the 1840s which cuts from north to south by the side of Kensington Palace. The moment you enter this hidden world, urban noise drops to sudden silence. Sodium street glare softens to the buttery glow of gaslights. Traffic stops. Queen Anne-style houses, blank-faced and often in total darkness, stand like big doll's houses behind locked gates. In one, chandeliers burn in an empty room. Another has an ugly anti-terrorist barrier which blocks the pavement and protects the villa behind. An Israeli flag hangs from the facade. Two armed policeman chat idly like the watchmen at Elsinore. "So I said to her…"
Ambassadors, oil magnates, sultans and princes live here. A house might cost you ?70m. As you walk north the style changes, from red-brick Dutch to stuccoed Italianate. You rarely see anyone come or go, in the houses or on the street. If they party, they do so deep in the interior of these massive buildings.
Last week I stared at the darkened windows of the Norwegian embassy, lit only by a few night-lights. A scribbled note – 'to those who died in vain" – was attached to the railings with a rose.
If, as sometimes happens, I dawdle too long, I may see my bus pass along the Bayswater Road, too far away to catch. As I wait at the stop, another prommer may turn up from another direction. "Bus to Oxford just gone?" Yes, I say. We see each other carrying Proms programmes. I fear he, rarely she, may ask me what I think as we sit down for the long wait.
Mariinsky Ballet's production of Swan Lake. Photograph: Robbie Jack/Corbis
This summer, in my dreams, I'm going to fly to America and spend three days in the Art Institute of Chicago, because it is full of paintings I want to see all the time – Seurat's La Grande Jatte, Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day, Watteau's Fete Champetre, the great Spaniards Cotan and Zurbaran.
But because that isn't going to happen, I'll get to America through the incomparable Richard Ford, whose novel The Lay of the Land I haven't yet read. And I'll get to Seurat through Robert Herbert's Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte, a wonderful art book almost unconsciously harbouring a tragic tale.
From Chicago I will fly to Denmark, hooked by The Killing but also by a desire to see the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershoi and Christen Kobke in their native Copenhagen (relatively recent discoveries for me) and to travel to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art out on what I imagine to be the ominously overcast Zeeland coast. Since this isn't going to happen either, I'll watch Danish director Susanne Bier's superb portrait of young and old love, After the Wedding, on DVD, starring Rolf Lassgard, who also happens to be my favourite of the three Kurt Wallanders. That will take me everywhere I want to go in Denmark.
I would love to see the Mariinsky Ballet's Swan Lake at Covent Garden, just to witness the famous chorus of Russian swans all moving in hypnotic harmony through the ice-blue light. But I will settle for Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life because even those friends who think the movie maddeningly cosmic say the stream of images is magnificent.
Summer holidays with small children means reading in brief bursts, preferably something passionate or pungent. I've got Oliver Sacks's The Mind's Eye, on the sense of sight and his experience of nearly losing his own, and Simon Schama's model essays on Dutch art in Dead Certainties. These will alternate with disproportionately longer stretches reading aloud from Little House on the Prairie.
I saw Kobke in one of those National Gallery shows, under Nicholas Penny, that have brought so much Scandinavian art to this country. The latest is Forests, Rocks, Torrents, a show – despite its title – full of mountains, steep viewpoints and high skies that I want to see on one of the gallery's Friday late openings, after which I'll walk home through the blue dusk. There is an exhilarating painting by Alexandre Calame that shows the triumphant view from a mountain summit: you could almost feel you'd climbed there. Art can take you anywhere.
I read all the year round: a book or two a week, usually. But life being what it is, the volumes on my bedside table will be mostly fiction, which seems to fit best with exhaustion, distraction and general busyness. The summer, then, is for more demanding stuff: for nonfiction and (whisper it) poetry. More specifically, it's a time for trying to recapture the experience of reading as a teenager when, exams over, the holidays would open out before me like some great, inviting canyon: in those halcyon summers, no work to do, no house to run, no person to care for but myself, I could really read. A sunny field. Me in my bikini. A Penguin Classic. Oh, the books I then bashed through like meringues!
This year I'm reading Graven With Diamonds, Nicola Shulman's sort-of biography of Thomas Wyatt, the Tudor poet. I have a thing about Wyatt, and here's why. When I was 18, and a hopeless case, I went for a university interview. It was conducted by two clever but (luckily for me) rather kind blue-stockings who asked me to read aloud Wyatt's "They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek". I didn't know who Wyatt was. Nor did I know how to pronounce all the weird Tudor spellings. I made a real hash of it. But I remember that the sense of the thing – paralysis! fear! betrayal! – nevertheless hit me like a bullet. Who was this fellow? And to whom was this mesmerising poem of his addressed?
I'm only a little way into Shulman's book but it's really exciting: a literary thriller. And it's all here: Wyatt's life as a courtier under what Shulman calls a Tudor Stalin (Henry VIII), and his careers as diplomat, spy and lover (Wyatt may have romped dangerously with Anne Boleyn). Shulman is brilliant on the poetry, performing a kind of high-wire balancing act in combining cool academic analysis with a 21st-century feeling for autobiography (she knows the scholars will think this mucky but she is too good a storyteller to care). She makes you understand why, in spite of the passage of 500 years and the disdain of most of the critics ("when he is good he is hardly one of the irresistible poets", said CS Lewis), these ghostly lyrics have somehow survived. I'm already dreading finishing it – though when I do, perhaps I will go back to the poems, which I haven't looked at properly for 20 years. What a swot. And then? Well, if we're really going to be honest about this, I still haven't seen Bridesmaids.
Roberto Bolano's The Skating Rink
When I was a child, August was about buildings more than beaches. Armed with a Blue Guide my parents would take us around towns in Italy, France or Portugal, scoring the monuments deemed worthy of the guide's stars, which were awarded with some parsimony and, I would later realise, arbitrariness. We of the younger generation would sometimes rebel, preferring to stay indoors and murder each other over games of Monopoly, but in the end I couldn't resist the conditioning.
So I now spend a lot of my year travelling to look at buildings. But the childhood pattern is reversed – August is the month when I try not to look at buildings. Not much, anyway. I like the month to be quite vacant, and my children seem to be less docile than I was; attempts to see anything architectural have long been met by cries of "boring boring boring". I will be somewhere rural, near Bordeaux, where the things I won't be seeing include the house designed by Rem Koolhaas for a severely disabled man, whose centrepiece is a lift that was also his client's study, a whole room that rises and falls through the house. I also won't see Jean Nouvel's hotel, Le St-James, and several works of Lacaton & Vassal, a French couple who do nice things, inter alia, with off-the-peg greenhouses.
I may find it harder to resist (for the tragically nerdy reason that I forgot my camera when I was last there) Le Corbusier's Quartier Modernes Fruges, a colony of houses built for a sugar-cube manufacturer. As it happens, they look quite like sugar cubes. The place is famous for the way the residents jollied up their purist houses with kitschy bits of ornament, which is sometimes taken as sign of the architect's failure to give people what they want, but I find that the architect's and residents' contributions each make the other more interesting.
What else to do there? I've heard there's some nice wine, and I might read a book, possibly by Roberto Bolano. I loved his The Skating Rink, a tale of desire, skulduggery and ice set on the Costa Brava, and his vast work 2666 is now giving me menacing/enticing looks from the shelf.
Chapelle du Rosaire in Saint Paul de Vence. Photograph: Hemis/Alamy
My summers will always be refracted through the prism of my first European summer, aged 17, hitchhiking southwards towards the Mani peninsula in the Peloponnese. Nothing I do this summer can begin to compare with those moments of lost time, and lost freedom. Never again will I read a novel as I read Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy on the bone-white road down the Dalmatian coast, ingesting those pages like a fierce, unappeasable drug.
That was the summer I made my first visit to the Uffizi, to the forum in Rome, got falling-down drunk in the streets of Ravenna and, most magical of all, crossed into Venice at sunset, stepping on to a crowded vaporetto as it ploughed up the Grand Canal towards the Rialto.
En route to la Serenissima, my friends and I had drifted round the south of France and somehow chanced upon one of the jewels of 20th-century art, the Matisse chapel just outside Vence, some 20km from Nice. This summer, if I could be transported anywhere on a magic carpet, that is where I would most want to be.
The work of great artists at the end of their lives can be austere and demanding. This little piece of paradise, however, finds a great artist communing with eternity in the most playful, airy spirit imaginable. Matisse's contributions to the Chapelle du Rosaire transform it into a sublime secular jewel: three stained glass windows of abstract design, three black and white murals, a stone altar, a bronze cross and a vibrant display of colourful ecclesiastical robes.
This summer, with the responsibilities of a parent, and no doubt struggling to catch up with the longlist for the 2011 Booker prize, especially the new novels from Jane Rogers and Sebastian Barry, I shall be putting my daughter on a flight to Marseilles for a summer camp in Provence. I've looked at the map. Greoux-les-Bains is an easy drive to Vence. Something tells me that the temptations of the Chapelle du Rosaire will win out.
? What are your tips for summer culture? Join the discussion
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