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

I went to one of these Sunday dinners about 5 years ago. I was living in Paris and taken there by friends - who didn't explain the concept to me in advance. So I found myself in someone's house, with a massive buffet table and was expected to help myself - there was then a long conversation with my friends about what was going on. Much incredulity on my part :-)

I met Jim very briefly - I guess I was one of hundreds of new people he meets every month. Mostly I hung out with other guests - who were mostly expats (I didn't hear much French) - and who also didn't know Jim very well.

He definitely stepped outside the box with this idea. This is something almost anyone with a big house could do in any place, but which only he actually did.

What a life! He costarted the Edinburgh Fringe; founded the alternative culture centre Arts Lab in London, where he mixed with David Bowie, John Lennon and Yoko Ono; ran a sexual liberation magazine in Amsterdam, and started Edinburgh's first paperback bookshop ... oh and was a university lecturer.

In amongst that, he had a standing open invitation to Sunday night meal. Anyone could come, they just had to email or phone him in advance and leave a donation in an envelope at the door when they arrived.

AND he compiled a list of people behind the Iron Curtain who would put up traveller guests and show them around, described in the article as a pre-Internet couchsurfing index.

Sad to read this. I went to a dinner 5 1/2 years ago with my partner and 11 month old. Jim was so kind and seemed happy we came with a baby. He let us use his room when our kid was crying, and coming from big cities in the US, I wondered how he didn't get everything ripped off.

The food wasn't great - a massive, massive bowl of spaghetti - and it was so crowded it was hard to actually talk to and meet that many people, but they vibe was special. It was my parents' hippy idealism in plain, unassuming practice. I was hoping to go again when we could travel finally.

I stayed at Jim Haynes’s place in Paris a few years ago—it was listed on Airbnb and seemed like an obvious choice.

He was welcoming and friendly but I didn’t spend enough time with him to properly connect.

Our world needs more people like this.

I have a consuming interest in the London counterculture of the late 1960s, and Jim Haynes was a very prominent figure who pops up in innumerable memoirs by others. Amazing that he managed to escape being “cancelled” though – his views on free sexual expression were already controversial among the incipient female-liberation side of the counterculture back then, and today would strike many as beyond the pale.

I would have liked to meet him, but by the time I learned about his Paris dinners, they seem to have lost their magic and become just a business of sorts. I read that those calling ahead to announce their coming were told by one of his hired staff "The price will be XX€, have it ready in exact change as you enter", and the majority of people one met were tourists coming to the dinners simply because it had popped up on lists of “things to do while in Paris”, and they had little or no knowledge of the man who organized them or the community for which they were originally organized.

As a slight tangent... has a successor to couchsurfing gained any traction yet? It is such a great concept, and one that can still provide so many great experiences.

I made it to one of Jim’s dinners in 2014. As someone said, the dinner was so so but the conversations were quite enjoyable. I’m glad I got to go.

I'd never heard of this man before. Now I'm sad that I hadn't learned of him earlier.

Still, it sounds like he had an amazing and full life.

A true social network pioneer who did it for all the right reasons.