I’d like to give the world a hug to keep it company

With Random Huggers Day approaching, Joe McNamee had mixed luck when he tried to get into the spirit of things on the streets of Cork.

EARLIER this year, I was dispatched onto the streets by my editor to dispense random compliments to all and sundry and a most terrifying experience it proved to be.

This Saturday is Random Huggers Day (RHD) and on the principle that there is no fool like an old fool the editor looked no further than this particular fool for another public humiliation.

So how would you react if an overfed, bearded lump on the dark side of 40 came up to you in the street offering to hug you with no other apparent motive than to ‘spread love, warmth and wonderful energy’?

RHD is the brainchild of London-based Mayella Reynolds who was inspired after hearing a radio DJ saying, “It seems you can find random terrorists on the streets — why don’t we find random huggers?”. She has staged annual public hugathons since 2003, huggers congregating under big banners, clad in RHD t-shirts, dispensing hugs and stickers to passing huggees, promoting nothing other than global brotherly and sisterly love through the medium of embrace. Huggers work in pairs and the reaction of huggees is invariably joy, laughter and even a few tears.

But Reynolds is surely in the ha’penny place, merely trotting after Mata Amritanandamayi — better known and renowned the world over as Amma, the Hugging Saint. A Hindu spiritual leader and teacher revered as a saint by her followers, her charitable organisation has helped hundreds of thousands of the world’s poorest. She has also, apparently, hugged 31 million people.

She has been giving darshan — Hindu for seeing the sacred — since she was a teenager, a natural consequence of comforting troubled souls. “If you can touch people, you can touch the world,” she says.

The Irish have embraced and, more to the point, been embraced by Amma in their thousands on her annual visits to Ireland since 2004.

Though we may laud ourselves as Latin spirits mistakenly trapped on a rain-sodden rock on Europe’s fringe, our supposedly latinate temperaments were usually first thing out the door when continental cousins started into a lather of cheek kissing and offhand hugging. A bonecrushing handshake did very nicely for us, thank you. And that was just the women.

But times are changing. The arrival of ecstasy on these shores in the early 1990s begat an entire generation who forsook alcohol-fuelled violence for drug-fuelled love and while a prolonged platonic hug between profusely sweating young heterosexual males in dimly-lit nightclubs might not quite tally with Amma’s ideal of darshan, it was a significant improvement on beating each other’s lights out after a Saturday-night skinful.

Now, hugging’s rife. There’s the male version, right hands clasped at chest height, left around the other’s neck, heads moving swiftly in and out but — crucially — both pairs of feet and therefore crotches maintain distance.

Then there’s the younger teenage version, mostly favoured by girls, which sees them shuffle together more closely, sprinkling air kisses a-go-go but with zero commitment to the embrace.

As a lifelong hugger, I find the first laughably uptight and the second fraudulently insincere. Emotionally outré would not have been the first description to spring to mind when recalling my father but, nonetheless, he hugged us goodnight every day of our lives for as long as we lived in his house, specifically, a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

And so I hug all my friends, male and female, and am often generous with the kissing to boot. They have learned to get over themselves and their embarrassment. It’s a lovely thing, a hug. So, why, on the streets of my hometown does it all go, for the most part, so horribly wrong? Very simple, I have no advertising, no banners, no stickers, no t-shirts, to give oncomers a moment or two to register and then decide. Even more importantly, I have no hugging compadres. One man on his own offering random hugs? Pervert.

I pass a miserable and utterly fruitless half-hour stopping strangers and offering hugs. Even as I succeed in getting a passerby to stop, I am either questioning my motives in stopping a woman or weighing up my chances of a hiding when stopping a man. Even the nice people politely decline. The monsoon rain doesn’t help matters and as I eventually take to calling out, “Free hugs”, the best I get is derisory laughter, most assuming I’ve had a few.

Later that evening, I stumble across Juan Mann on the internet. Juan, like me, was a solo hugger who took to the streets of Sydney when feeling low brandishing a sign saying ‘Free Hugs’. A YouTube video of Juan doing his thing has had 67,000,000 hits to date and he has appeared on Oprah and written a book about his exploits.

Two days later, photographer Denis Minihane and I hit the streets to take a picture to accompany this article. Anticipating another hugless day, I have printed a sign, similar to Juan’s, to get the message across for the shot but less than 30 seconds after holding it up, a girl bounds out of a nearby coffee shop.

“Are you really giving free hugs?” she exclaims with delight. “Sure am!” says I and she bounds into my arms and gives me a right old squeeze.

“That made my day,” she beams.

“Mine too,” I beam right back at her.

Krystal is her name and she’s from Brisbane and, yes, she has heard of the ‘Sydney Hugging Guy’.

It’s true, that great breakthroughs are often preceded by a sign.

* Random Huggers Day is on Saturday May 7.