Jim Haynes: A man who invited the world over for dinner

Jim Haynes was both an icon and a relic of the Swinging Sixties, an American in Paris who was famous for inviting hundreds of thousands of strangers to dinner at his home.

I bought a last-minute ticket and jumped on the Eurostar to Paris, motivated by a sudden urge to have dinner with a friend.

Inside, people were squeezing, shoulder to shoulder, through the narrow kitchen.

Absolutely anyone was welcome to come for an informal dinner, all you had to do was phone or email and he would add your name to the list.

My article was about meeting people through the Couchsurfing website, where locals opened their homes to strangers for free around the world.

This was before AirBnB worked out how to monetise the idea, and the concept of non-commercial cultural exchange was right up Jim's street.

I had imagined some sort of intimate dinner party with cultural elites, but what I found was more like a student house party - albeit with more mature attendees and only moderate alcohol consumption.

People to People read the cover line.

The idea was that if people could not easily see the Western world themselves, he would bring it to them via travellers.

I suppose I wanted to meet people to subvert stereotypes and show that not all the pictures you have in your head are real.".

"But a lot of younger people wanted to be in the book… I was getting sackfuls of mail.

So he turned his home into an "embassy" and started producing world passports for anyone who wanted one.

The documents were so convincing that some people used them to cross borders.

Jim always dismissed the idea that it was a naïve undertaking, but he was trusting to a fault, according to some of his friends, and this led to financial mistakes and legal troubles over the years.

Sometimes he didn't even read them," says Jesper, his son, who was born during Jim's marriage to Viveka Reuterskiold in the 1960s.

People wanted to claim him, but he was unclaimable.".

Jesper credits his father with opening the world to him.

"It became less spontaneous as people tried to book six months ahead - which was anathema to how Jim travelled and also annoying as those people were more likely to do a no-show - but at the same time, these online articles re-energised the idea.

An estimated 150,000 people have come over the years.

"It was a revolving door of guests - some who wanted to stay over, and others who just wanted to say hello.

The only thing that really got Jim down was people leaving," says Jesper.

Amid the outpouring of online tributes since his death in his sleep on 6 January, these words from Jesper stand out: "His goal from early on was to introduce the whole world to each other

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