A short excerpt from the book
I couldn’t help but let the usual smile bleed across my face as the now familiar wall of a man walked out from the comparatively small arrivals gate at Gatwick airport.
It had been less than a year since I’d first met this gentle giant, after seeing a multitude of photos of his tattooed features on my neighbours website.
Whilst gazing at the pictures - depicting him holding a glass of ale in his hands at our village’s annual regatta - the words; lay-about, hobo and penner drifted easily through my mind as I took in the colours of his war-painted facial skin, complete with metal drill-bit piercings and card-suit inlays in his smiling incisors. It was all my prejudice could do to keep nodding enthusiastically as my newly inherited neighbour sang out the praises of this, as I was to find, truly extraordinary character.
For a person who, amongst other things, had spent over four years working in Berlin’s central station, helping the people of the ‘Bahnhoff’s Mission’ provide food, shelter and a consoling ear to the multitude of guests who had found themselves living a life on the streets, I should have known better.
Regardless, the prejudices within me evidently still had a voice - albeit quietened by my own experiences.
How humbling it was, then, to find out the true mission of this Minnesotan mountain now approaching me across the polished marbled floor of Gatwick Airport. And exactly what it was that he did to earn himself that well deserved adoration.
I lifted my comparatively small 5’ 11’’ frame up on tiptoes to give the wall a hug. Clutching his trademark Apple Mac computer case in his mighty hands - an essential tool for a man who, in a day, religiously exchanges more Emails with his aficionados, than the Pope receives blessings - he reciprocates, as his deep liquid voice reverberates like a V8 Chevy in my ears.
‘Mark, how ya doin’?’ he purred, his simple greeting cowering under the weight of his natural warmth.
And so, with a reassuring slap on the back, and a twist of the heels, we were off out of the airport. For him, just another week in the life of the ‘new face of love’. For me, the start of seven days and seven nights of exploration into the mind, life and psyche of a man who, in the last five years alone, had entered the lives, and hearts of over five million people worldwide.
