English summers make me feel sentimental and bucolic. There is something very Famous Five about cycling along country lanes with a bottle of lemonade and a ham sandwich, and of course, the right book in your knapsack.

I live not far from Slad, the famous setting of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, written in 1959, but invoking a world just after the First World War, where the kitchen garden is full of current bushes, and long hot summers are spent outdoors in the fields.

It is a world of heavy horses and heavy clothes, but strangely lighter hearts, it seems, whatever the privations. Perhaps that is nostalgia on my part, or perhaps our own world of life lived indoors, in the complex isolation of the Information Age, where nobody knows what to believe or what to say, really does make for a weighted heart. I sometimes think that obesity is much more than junk food; we have lost our lightness of being.

And so, these seductive summer outdoor stories, some funny some sad, seem good reading companions on my old-fashioned day-trips, usually alone, with a picnic and a dog, twenty miles or so into deep green Englishness.

I have just re-read Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889), the wonderfully funny tale of George, Harris, J, and Montmorency the dog, taking a boat-trip on the Thames from Kingston to Oxford.
A running theme of their travels is the marvels of tinned food, and while I am usually a grow-it-in-the-garden gourmet, even I cannot resist a Warhol moment on my summer journeys; the Campbell’s tomato soup comes with me.

Three Men is such an innocent book, with an innocence that was certainly lost after the First World War, and buried forever by Freud.

But if life was more straightforward, it was in other ways much more punitive, especially in sexual affairs, where innocence quickly became guilt and censure. This is perfectly and painfully recorded in LP Hartley’s The Go-Between, (1953), set in the summer of 1900 in Norfolk, but related by the elderly Leo, whose youthful trust and ardour were brutally broken by the events of that summer, as he dutifully trots with messages between the upper-class Marian, and the tenant farmer, Ted Burgess, whose hopeless love eventually leads to suicide.

The Go-Between is the base plot for Ian McEwen’s Atonement (2001), which begins on the hottest day of 1935, and sweats through the misery of lower-class Robbie Turner’s love for smart Cecila Tallis.
The 1970 film of The Go-Between, starring Alan Bates and Julie Christie is as compelling as Joe Wright’s 2007 version of Atonement, but neither is as wackily perfect as My Summer of Love, directed by Pavel Pawlikowski, and based on the novel by Helen Cross.

My Summer of Love is a much better film than it is a book, perhaps because the steamy heat that rubs off on Tasmin and Mona as they discover their sexuality works better on screen, as does the building tension of the relationship.

Yet, for a triangle of summer tensions, I love Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2005), the holiday coming-of-age story of Astrid and Magnus, and what happens when the B movie plot of the stranger appearing at the door comes true for them in their rented cottage in Norfolk, over one long bored summer.

One of the best murder mysteries in print has to be Ruth Rendell’s A Fatal Inversion (1987). Writing as Barbara Vine, Rendell uses the boiling summer of 1976 as a powerful part of her plot. This is a shiveringly good read, especially by torch, in a tent.

The way I’ve been collecting summer reads about summer, I shall either have to leave out the tinned food or get a bike with more gears. Still to come are Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, (1927) the story of the Ramsey family holidaying on Skye, which opens with the quintessential English summer sentence. ‘Yes of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ and Woolf’s glorious Jacob’s Room (1922), another pre-WW1 setting, beginning on holiday in Scarborough, and ending with the boom of navel guns out at sea at night, ‘as if nocturnal women were beating great carpets.’

And then I must get onto Brideshead Revisited – another cry for lost youth and lost Englishness, somehow bound up with lost summers, and after that I shall soak myself in those scenes of DH Lawrence, both Women in Love, and Sons and Lovers; in particular the physical animal happiness of Paul Morel with Clara, naked in the sun, by the sea.