It’s a strange time, the summer holidays in Australia. Some people have riveting memories of Boxing Day tests, of Australian Opens to die for and then as time moved on of Arts Festivals in Adelaide and Perth and even Sydney and the sight – in Adelaide at least – of attentive Brits beaten down by that sun fresh from the desert. But the summer holidays in the great Southern Land where we hug the coastline while dreaming of the centre is part of the topsyturviness of Australian life. And people have all sorts of plans of how they might wile away the time as the heat suggests sleep but the mind says leisure should be profitable.

Christmas evokes the lustre and enchantment of the Myer shop windows, shamefully attacked in recent weeks. Just as the Australian Ballet’s Nutcracker was a dream call for any woman who has known since she was a girl that the dance is the point where pleasure and perfection of movement meet.

Something melts in all of us at those productions for kids of that sublime story The Wind in the Willows with the madcap Toad, the civilised Rat, the loyal Mole and the paternal Badger. With Pooh and Christopher Robin it’s one of the glorious things we inherit from Britain and you don’t need good intentions – just an enraptured ankle-biter – to allow the magic to soar back into life again.

And, a bit differently, there can be the variable but real pleasure of lying on a blanket in the Botanical Gardens while a group of thesps knock on heaven’s door in the hope that the ghost of Shakespeare will come alive. And it sometimes happens: some years ago Kate Kendall was a country-and-western Beatrice in a Glenn Elston production of Much Ado About Nothing which had all the magic in the world.

But you might be well advised not to attempt to take in the Bard’s Complete Works over the couple of weeks you take off during this time when idleness itself can seem holy.

Don’t get me wrong. The twelve days of Christmas are quite a proposition even though Ian McKellen has a point when he quotes his Cambridge tutor who said he was only interested in seeing Twelfth Night played by archangels.

Well, you can be for that and do your best to realise it. The greatest audio recording of the play is the Caedom one which has the great Irish actress Siobhán McKenna – the woman who did the finest characterisation ever of Joyce’s Molly Bloom – as Viola, Vanessa Redgrave as Olivia and Paul Scofield (the greatest tragedian of his generation who won an Oscar for A Man for all Seasons) as the put-upon Malvolio. And if you want a TV version, there’s one with Joan Plowright as both Viola and her brother Sebastian, Tommy Steele as the clown Feste, Adrienne Corri as Olivia, Ralph Richardson as a Falstaff-like Toby Belch and Alec Guinness as Malvolio.

So let’s make an exception for Twelfth Night which coincides with the coming of the Three Wise Men. But it might be a bit ambitious to take on too much Shakespeare. And if you think Ingmar Bergman was the nearest thing to a successor to Shakespeare it would take a very dedicated soul indeed to watch all his films from the 1950s’ masterpieces such as Smiles of a Summer’s Night and The Seventh Seal to Scenes from a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander decades later.

It was marvellous that Jaime Martín and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra did all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies but he knows what he’s doing with his movie scores too. My hunch is that a lot of people avoid difficult pleasures over whatever summer holiday. I remember snatches of summer holidaying at Red Hill reading le Carré’s A Perfect Spy, the one about the conman father, maybe as close as the Cold Warrior trashmeister got to art but the salt-spray sea air and the bush won hands down. Would a holiday peppered with the great dramatised versions – Burton as Leamas, Guinness as Smiley, Hugh Laurie in the transfigured The Night Manager – be a relaxing contender? Well, why not, but how would this compare with the summer light and dark companionable night of Angelsea when it seems blessed by God?

I hedge my bets that the long, hot summer is not the time to start reading Proust or Ulysses or listening to Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. A belated reading of Len Deighton might do the trick or it might be in one ear and out the other without the benefit of Michael Caine.

Many years ago at the height of the predominance of Sam Goldberg – the great Leavisite much praised by Germaine Greer – a young man in academic gown marched into the Public Lecture Theatre bearing a placard that said ‘Down With Seriousness’ and traversed the huge space. It’s a golden memory of a holiday from the grandeurs of artistic reverence for those who recall it.

What’s that old, mellow Californian rock song say? ‘Take it easy. Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.’ So it’s all a matter of pinning your colours to the wisdom of that attractive Jackson Browne song. Somehow the Australian summer seems a time to let it all hang. Some of us can remember the real pleasure of reading the new Patrick White at Christmas (and asking for it as a present) but somehow that wasn’t any kind of chore.

I used to drink in a pub run by a famous footballer, Percy Jones, where as part of the merry-go-round of life you would sometimes find yourself talking to a state school headmistress who read every word of Jane Austen every year of her life and who could also sing every note and every sly satirical word of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. She was also a sporty woman and a Collingwood supporter but you’d be inclined to think the cricket and the tennis might have been dominant for her in the aftermath of Christmas and with the New Year and all its bright hopes beckoning.

Well, you never know, you can never advise. Dickens lives for us even though Christmas for him was a snowbound landscape, some fraction of the time. You can’t advise people but if you had to Mystery Road, the great indigenous crime show, would be a serious contender.