It had long been clear that we wanted to make Mr Rickman a very special gift for his 60th birthday. The big idea struck us at the beginning of April 2005, and after the initiator got over with her final uni exams we started to put said idea into action.

What do you present a man with by whose existence a trip to the cinema becomes a worthwhile adventure again, the expensive DVD player eventually amortises and boring lunch breaks, rainy Sundays and empty spots on living-room walls can be filled?
One of these black shirts that suit him so well? A golden pen for writing autographs? A Rolex? A Porsche? A villa at Lake Geneva? One thing’s for sure: you’d like best to give him the world, which, however, won’t founder on the so far unanswered question where to get an 30’000-mile long gift ribbon (it ought to be long enough for a nice bow, oughtn't it?) alone.
In the end we have come to the wise conclusion we don’t have to give the world to Mr. Rickman if we can show him that it is at his feet already.
Thus, all we had to do was to wait for some inspirations that would show us a way to supply this evidence. One of these inspirations resulted in the creation of this website. Between September 2005 and February 2006 we used it to look for fellow admirers around the globe who would make their contribution to Love-Linked.

Initially we were looking for 60 people from 60 countries who would make their contribution to a world-spanning chain of birthday greetings. Each participant would make a paper chain link according to our instructions. On the front side of their link they would write a birthday wish in their native language. To give each participant the chance to address Mr Rickman with a few personal words, the back sides of the links were available for individual design.
The finished links were sent to us and then joined together. We expected the result to be a gift of great symbolic value, i. e. a world-spanning chain of birthday whishes that was supposed to show Mr Rickman his work is appreciated across cultural and linguistic boundaries everywhere in the world.

Unfortunately the search for participants proved to be more difficult than expected. In addition, quite a few people backed out of their participation, which is why we finally ended up with "only" 28 links, all of which were amazingly gorgeous. The quality of the contributions and the enthusiasm of the participants exceeded our expectations by far and made sure we never ceased to take pleasure in working for this project during the six months it was running. We are still enthusiastic about the final results and happy about the many great friends we made through Love-Linked.