Several things make a post
Jiggety-jig: am back at home. Partner has nasty cold (I really don't think the train journey and then dash to shops helped...) but it is a bit better today.
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My father has taken to Mamma Mia like whoa and all of us who were in and not at the pub quiz watched the DVD (though thankfully not the sing-along version) on Boxing Day evening. Fun: not trying to be deep, realistic, serious, message-y, etc, and indeed, the slightness of the plot, featuring mainly as a string to hang the songs on, and various other things harked back, surely deliberately, to the very similar Astaire/Rogers movies? There was a certain knowing ironic note in the way bystanders suddenly turned into a singing dancing chorus, but the whole 'Dancing Queen' number reminded me of 'The Continental' at the end of The Gay Divorce in which the entire population of (the really rather improbable) Brighton, and probably Hove as well, appear to be caught up in the Dionysiac frenzy engendered by F & G finally getting together (even Edward Everett Horton, who dances like a not particularly ept dancing bear). Okay, the male leads were utter ciphers but one has seen so many movies in which the female characters were ciphers that I can really live with that - also, something that could have turned into angsty middle-aged male movie about 'Do I have unsuspected daughter?' was about half a scene between songs.
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Someone else has noticed that the Hampstead adultery novel doesn't really exist. A fairly interesting piece by Kate Kellaway on literary places.
Stella Gibbons wrote several novels set in Hampstead (I have surely remarked before that many of her novels are love-songs to London; even when she is being critical of the urban pace of life) - but they are not about adultery and not even particularly about the wealthy and privileged but the marginal and struggling.
And on the subject of Gibbons, has no-one else noticed this piece of Cold Comfort Farm fanfic on Yuletide? (I haven't seen it mentioned) - Flora deals firmly with hardboiled private eye when Seth is suspected of doing away with his co-star in Hollywood. Awww bless.
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Dept of Tired of London? Tired of Life! in the taxi from the station we went past something I'd never registered before: the Swedenborg Society Grade II listed premises on Bloomsbury Way.