Mehran Karimi Nasseri arrived without papers at Charles de Gaulle airport in 1988 and didn’t leave until 2006. We shared its metal benches, a bomb scare and many, many Filets-O-Fish
“He’s been living in an airport for nearly 20 years,” said my agent.
My morning’s writing had been blissfully interrupted by an unexpected request that I catch a Eurostar to Paris and get to Charles de Gaulle airport “by 3pm if possible”. This is the sort of request that authors live for, but that rarely ever happens in real life. At the airport, I was to meet Sir Alfred Mehran, a stateless political refugee who had (at that point, in 2004) been living on a bench in the departure lounge of Terminal 1 for 16 years. If we liked each other then we were to co-write his autobiography, to be called The Terminal Man.
