Catherine Deveney - Keira Knightley? 'No way I'd want to be that famous!'

JOHN Smeaton belongs on the pages of the Beano. Larger than life, a cartoon figure whose voice soars and dips with a mad kind of animation, words getting swallowed into a vortex of screeching vocal emphasis in the strangest of places.

He has all the cheeky charm of Dennis the Menace. (Smeaton was constantly in scrapes as a kid, a terrible boy for 'chap door runaway' and he always got caught. See the leatherings he got from his father?) But he also has that streak of decency. Protecting the public. Dragging a man from a burning car. It was all in a day's work as an airport baggage handler for Smeato from the Beano.

Except… except… there reached a point where you couldn't help wondering if the media image really grew from Smeaton, or Smeaton grew from the media image. So here I am, one year on from the attack, standing on his doorstep in a nice leafy suburb of Erskine, where he lives with his mum and dad, to find out. He's opening the door, a slight figure smiling warmly, but his grey blue eyes are cast to the ground as the door opens, which is quite disconcerting. They roll a bit as he stands aside to let me in, but we've shaken hands, gone into his sitting room, sat down, and he still hasn't looked me directly in the eye once. In fact, it takes him several minutes, though once he gets started he's off and running. Who'd have thought it? Smeato is shy.

Shy in a Glasgow way. He has that fantastic, funny, Glasgow volubility that makes him sound like he's in the middle of a drunken ramble when he's stone cold sober. But just as drunks occasionally surprise you with flashes of perspicacity borne of lack of inhibition, so too does Smeaton. He strips things of their complications, gets right down to their essence. It can sound simplistic until you really think about what he says and accept the humorous, punchy truth of it. It's what appealed to people after the airport attack when Smeaton looked in the camera and said, "This is Glasgow. We'll set about you."

Take terrorism. Smeaton has very definite views. "I can understand people's political views and I can understand people getting frustrated. And at the end of the day one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. But I don't think anything in this world justifies deliberately going out and targeting the innocent. To push your political views on other people, you will kill them?" he asks incredulously. He throws in the IRA, the UVF, as examples, saying, for heaven's sake, both sides believed in the same God. Until, in a crescendo of high-pitched emphasis, he says, see when you get down to the nitty gritty? Terrorism is just, "like someone having an argument over which is better – McDonald's or Burger King." His point? They're still bloody burgers, aren't they?

He talks with absolute seriousness but like a true comedian, seizes delightedly on his audience's laughter. Al-Qaeda? They're in the Pizza Hut van. "When you look at how childish the whole thing is… I mean live and let live."

In the aftermath of the Glasgow Airport attack, Smeaton's interviews managed to capture an affable insistence on decency without any of the bile that sometimes accompanies moral rectitude.

Smeaton says he doesn't think that those who engage in terrorism are inherently evil. But he adds: "I think the devil is at work in them." The devil is quite an old-fashioned concept, but maybe that was the other thing people liked about Smeaton. He seemed to stand for a kind of respect – a sense of civic duty – that was a cry from a bygone age and people seized on it, keen that it still be seen to represent some part of us. "I'm not a very religious person," he continues. "But I think if someone wants to kill, maim, then the devil's at work. If you see someone crossing the road, and you feel impelled to go and help them, that's God at work, the goodness in you."

He believes in God? "Och, I think everyone… I believe in God. I believe in a supreme being. Definitely a supreme being. I definitely have that belief. Definitely. Definitely." As we saw at the airport, he's not tentative.

Smeaton understands why many Muslims don't want western ways pushed on them. "It's against their traditions and I understand that. That's totally and utterly fine. But don't move to the West if you don't like the way we live. Stay on your side of the fence and I'll stay on mine, sort of thing." But actually, he'd love to cross the fence and visit Islamic countries. "I would love to go. You look at some of the architecture…" he says, that heavy emphasis in his voice suggesting total awe, "some of the stuff from Persia… from Iran… I'd love to go."

It's one of the great ironies of what has happened to Smeaton. While others have found their worlds being closed down by events, Smeaton's world has up opened completely. He had only left Britain once since he was 16, but at 32 he was suddenly travelling to Barcelona, to New York, to places he'd only read about. Would he go back to the way things were a year ago? He looks suddenly serious. He wouldn't mind the quiet life. But he doesn't regret for one minute the opportunity to leave his job. He'd been a baggage handler for 12 years and though he loved his workmates, his knees and his back ached.

He left when he was offered a position in security at the airport car park. What could possibly happen to your Ford Mondeo if Smeato was watching? He seized every opportunity and still can't believe he has a weekly column in the Sun, the paper he always read at his work. The strangest thing has been losing his anonymity. Unpleasant or just interesting? Interesting, he says. The thing is that he always loved being loud and silly with his mates, but take him out of his group and he's not that confident. He loves meeting people but he has realised that he's happy being Z-list. Imagine being Keira Knightley or someone A-list. "There's no way I'd want to be that famous. No chance. Your life is not your own."

But what about his own public image. Did the media create it? Or is it as airbrushed as Keira Knightley's? "What you saw on the telly was me. My mates all said it was like I was talking to them. That's just who I am." Then a website started, encouraging "drinks behind the airport bar" for Smeaton. (In the end he donated money to the fire service, the police and Erskine hospital.) But he didn't initiate the attention. "I'm not that way. I hope I never try to be full of myself." His mates teased him mercilessly. "Right superstar," they said when he returned to work. "Get your arse over there and get they bags lifted."

He's amazed the attention has lasted this long. But he has grabbed opportunities because he can now see what life was. Before, he dreamed of leaving the airport but would tell himself he was fine where he was. "But it kind of made me realise there's more to life than working in a baggage haul. Money isn't everything. I don't mind in life not having a lot of money. But guys I used to work with… they'd go to their work and end up passing away… you know, getting not well at work and going up the road and passing away and I'd think to myself, my God. Your last day of life, your last day on this planet, was stuck in that baggage haul, in a dim light with no sunlight, no fresh air, the constant rattling of belts. Constant noise. Constant klaxons going off. I don't want that."

It's been reported that he's going off to live in America but he's only going on holiday. He met his American girlfriend Christy McPhedran – the best thing to come out of this year though it's a close call with training at Ibrox park with his beloved Rangers – on a trip to the States. They correspond by e-mail, talk on the internet, but he's now given up his job to go on a month's trip to the west coast. He'll just see where life takes him. Back home, he's been looking at college courses. He grins when asked if he knows what he wants to do. Yeah. Well give us a clue.

He loves fish. He'd like to study fish farming or aquaculture. So tell me, is he the kind of fisherman who tells tall stories about the weight of his fish? "Noooo!" he says, a little embarrassed. He always wishes he could say he caught a 15-pounder but the biggest he ever caught was a pike approaching double figures and an 8lb rainbow trout. He understands the question. There have been those who have accused Smeaton of exaggeration. He wasn't the only brave person at the airport. (Look back at early news interviews and Smeaton insists on that from the start.) But the others haven't received as much attention.

Smeaton doesn't understand that. But perhaps there was something about him that was so stereotypically Glaswegian that it tickled people. How does he sum up the Glasgow character up? "The Glasgow character is stand your ground. The mentality to me is, I'll be your mate and I'll always be your mate, but see if you want to f*** with us? We'll f*** straight back."

Smeaton epitomised that and he did so with humour, but he does understand the frustration of others who watched the media focus on him. "I always said I'd be unhappy if I was in their position. Of course you must be a bit annoyed that someone else is getting the attention and you're not. That's got to grate. It would grate with anyone. But at the end of the day there's not much I can do about it."

Is he embarrassed at the idea people might think he's a fraud? "I couldn't care less what people think. I know what I did that day." And if he were the one being ignored? Would he have spoken out about his annoyance? Smeaton answers instantly, the humorous light in his eyes extinguishing. "No," he says, with his own kind of dignity. "I'd have kept that to myself. That's all I'll say."

But the others should, like him, all have been given the Queen's Gallantry Medal, he says. Did he consider refusing it because they weren't? My mother wouldn't have let me, he says instantly. He repeats it twice, swallowing in between. His mother is very patriotic. "She said if the Queen offers you something, you take it. You deserve it son. My mother said I deserved it."

Smeaton became the working-class hero but, actually, his mother was a pharmacist, his father a health board financial manager. But there were lots of people with more than him growing up in Erskine. His parents taught him the value of money and how you shouldn't fritter it. Which he's very good at, by the way.

He was also encouraged to work hard and be responsible for his own actions. His father was quoted as saying he wanted John to get a new job out of this. Were his parents more ambitious for him than he is for himself? He laughs silently, looking down at the floor and nodding his head vigorously. He was the youngest and he was different from his two older sisters. "They're mega bright," he says. He used to be terrified coming home with his school reports. He got a few general standard grade passes but he wasn't academic. What did the reports say? "Inattentive in class. Could do better. Looks out the window."

Well he did do better. And looking out the window is the appealing quality about Smeaton. The street poet who captures what other people think but dreams of something beyond himself. "I'm a ponderer," he says. "I ponder through life." He's never been married. No, no, never married he says, in such a way that I suggest he's more frightened of a wife than pulling a man from a burning car. "Commitment!" he says. "Oh noooooo!"

Smeaton has all the body language, the speech patterns, of the complete chancer. But actually, he's more than that cartoon character. His life has changed completely this last year and maybe it's to his credit that he's been open to possibilities.

Ask him what's ahead and he says, "I feel a bit like I'm walking on a path where the next stone is still to be put down." He relishes unpredictability after 12 years in the mundane routine of baggage haul. That terrorist attack made him see that wherever life leads, you should follow. His great uncle Stevie used to take him fishing. On the river bank, he'd tell him, 'what's for you'll no go by you son." "But every so often," says Smeaton, "if you see something you particularly fancy, you have to stick your hand out and grab it."