Europe By Train: London #2: Love...Hate...Love

For all that we rant about social media, there are moments when I marvel at the way it can connect us. At the start of my "Europe By Train" trip, www.mysteryplayground.net asked me to blog about the London book benches commissioned by Britain's Literacy Trust. http://www.mysteryplayground.net/2014/07/dateline-london-literary-investigation.html. They quickly became a high point of my stay, so I also wrote about them on my own London blog - http://dianarchambers.blogspot.com/2014/07/reborn-again.html - and shared photos on Facebook and Twitter. My favorite, which I discovered by accident, was Around the World in 80 Days, pictured above.

One of my most popular bench "shares" was Hercule Poirot and The Greenshore Folly by Agatha Christie. It was retweeted several times and thus I came to "meet" the artist, London-based New Zealander Mandii Pope. When I asked for a good front view, she was gracious enough to send it to me.

Here's my own rear angle in a Bloomsbury garden square on a fine summer day.

Mandii also shared images of her Narnia bench which I had been unable to visit.

And here is Aslan! 

It was great to see Mandii's studio photos. Isn't she a doll?

You can follow Mandii Pope and her work on Facebook and Twitter.

As for me, next stop: Paris via Eurostar. http://dianarchambers.blogspot.com/2014/07/europe-by-train-3-my-paris.html