There are few more beautiful places on this Earth than the English countryside on a hot summer day (we do get them occasionally you know.) When we were kids my sister and I used to spend two weeks every summer staying with out auntie Carol in Derbyshire where we’d fill our days cycling along dusty country lanes, fishing for sticklebacks in shady streams, picking berries, and generally being happy-go-lucky youngsters frollocking about England’s green and pleasant land, getting grass stains on our knees and stung by nettles. All that was over 30 years ago and my memories of those days are very hazy so it probably wasn’t anywhere near as utopian as it sounds, but my heart still swells when I see rolling green hills and I drift off into a wistful reverie of long ago perfect summers.

Elusive as butterflies though those moments are, Virgina Astley tried to capture them on her 1983 album “From Gardens Where We Feel Secure” which evokes the hazy, lazy glow of a pastoral English summer day with ambient piano instrumentals that float along like dandelion spores, dressed up with field recordings of chirping birds, church bells, creaking garden gates and baa-ing lambs. It’s as precious as little cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off and really nothing more than wallpaper music (classy Laura Ashley wallpaper though) but when I hear it I get all dreamy and reflective and have an urge for a cold glass of Robinson’s Barley Water.

It could just be my advancing age and sentimentality but I always thought there was a heavy sadness underneath the pretty surface of this record. Not just because even the most perfect summer day has to come to an end, but there’s a yearning for an Arcadian idyll that doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did. Yes, even on a perfect summer day we English can find something to be depressed about.

Download: A Summer Long Since Passed – Virginia Astley (mp3)