Weekend Reading List

I'd never taken a morning flight to London before and found out that the SQ 308 flight that leaves Singapore at 9am for London is probbaly the most civilised flight you can take, if you, like me, have a very rigid body clock and are prone to jetlag. It's more civilised than the red-eye for me because by the time those midnight flights actually take off, it's already three hours pass my normal bedtime. What with the feeding and fuss that goes on and on when you board a flight, I'm jet-lagged even before I start. And how people can eat a three-course meal plus cheese after midnight is rather beyond me, and reminds me of those Enid Blyton midnight picnics in my beloved childhood books.Yes, gentle reader, I consumed Enid Blyton books like a caterpillar consumes a jasmine bush - rapidly, remorselessly, thoroughly - not a leaf unchewed. By the way, those books are forever desecrated by Enid, the 2009 biopic I watched recently. Helena Bonham Carter, as Enid Blyton, is an unsympathetic, damaged, and hypocritical monster. The accent is wonderfully posh (who speaks like this anymore? Not anyone in London, let me tell you), but the character appalling, and makes one reappraise Ms Blyton's prodigious output in a negative light. All is not innocence and summer picnics and cute kids.
Back to the flight: It's 13 hours or so, and when you reach London, (it's bedtime for my body clock), just enough of a stretch for you to take a hot bath, order a meal, and then sleep for a very long time. And then it's the next day, and you can go about your trip as buoyant as a butterfly. Of course I stayed awake the entire flight (it is day for me after all!) and read the 1931 Agatha Christie book The Sittaford Mystery from cover to cover. It starts and ends with a seance - very thrilling. If I wasn't on a flight, I'd never be able to read uninterupted like this, and so I was very pleased. I hope no one is going to make a biopic of Dame Agatha Chrsitie and spoil her wonderful books for me, or else another great pleasure will be sullied.
Did you know that Gustav Klimt was also a fashion designer and photographer? I'm looking at a very interesting little book from Assouline titled Klimt & Fashion. It studies his portraits with emphasis on the clothes and frabrics, some of which were actual dresses and prints he designed with his mistress Emilie Floge, who managed an important couture house in Vienna in the 1910s. The photos of Ms Floge wearing those Werner Werkstatte clothes are inspiring.To recover from London, I'm reading the collected writings of Diana Mosley, The Pursuit of Laughter: Essays, Articles, Reviews & Diary of The Most Controversial Mitford Sister. Those Mitford girls are so very twee.