“YOU’RE told it’s all about angels flying around your head. But I just saw these flashes of light.

“There was nothing in colour. Everything was black, white, grey and silver.

“It was like looking through the end of a kaleidoscope with all these spinning diamonds. Things were happening behind them but I couldn’t see what.

“And it was quiet, just very, very quiet. It was nothing to be scared of but there was no sound whatsoever.

“I was thinking ‘so this is what a near death experience is like’.”

On a mobile line from Germany, Lutz Pfannenstiel recalls the incident when, playing in goal for Park Avenue against Harrogate Town, he had been pronounced dead on the pitch following a collision.

He got an accidental knee in the chest from Clayton Donaldson, now a Birmingham striker, and stopped breathing – three times.

Physio Ray Killick gave him mouth-to-mouth but feared he was gone. The next thing Pfannenstiel knew, he was waking up in a hospital bed in a world minus colour or sound.

Twelve years on, Pfannenstiel’s recollections of that Boxing Day remain understandably hazy. But he is still spooked whenever Donaldson pops up on TV.

“Recently I was in London to do a show with Danny Baker and they showed me a little clip of Clayton Donaldson. I still got a shiver on my back.

“I remember the clash but not a lot else. It was a typical Boxing Day, bad weather, lots of people.

“But I know I still owe my life to Ray. It was the first time he had done mouth-to-mouth and he did it very well.

“Okay, I would have wished it was a female physio rather than an old guy. But he did a great job!”

Pfannenstiel is now head of international relations and scouting for German Bundesliga club 1899 Hoffenheim as well as a regular football pundit on television.

He is also the author of an autobiography with a difference after a career that featured 25 clubs. He is the only footballer to have played professionally across six different continents – Antartica has so far eluded him, though not for much longer it seems.

Pfannenstiel’s book, “The Unstoppable Keeper”, has just been translated into English and it is as far removed from a standard football story as possible.

You can’t do the tales justice in one piece but trust me you won’t have read anything like this before.

Avenue was stop number 12 and came after a spell in a Singapore jail when he had been wrongly convicted of match-fixing.

He said: “For me, Park Avenue was a little bit different. It was my first club when I started to train again after the prison sentence.

“It was very difficult at first to get myself mentally and physically back in shape, especially in those surroundings. It was no easy way back.

“The Unibond League was kind of like a war field. For a goalkeeper, it was one of the most difficult leagues in the world because everybody would try to smash you.”

Pfannenstiel’s on-pitch drama in Christmas 2002 made the front page of the Telegraph & Argus. But it could almost pass as just another day in his incredible story.

He added: “Normally you buy a football book because you are a fan of that club – whether it is Man United or Bayern Munich.

“Typical top footballers play all their lives for two or three clubs. So what can they tell you about other than winning the Champions’ League, winning the cup and training very hard?

“They’ve not experienced the crazy things. In my book there’s a little bit of adventure, a little bit of travelling – it’s about a boy from a small town who had a dream to become a footballer.

“I could have stayed in Germany like 200 other goalkeepers, had a normal career and a very steady family from Bavaria. But that’s not me.”

Whether it’s contract negotiations with a gun on the table or a misguided idea to kidnap a penguin from its colony to stick in the bath, Pfannenstiel has got a yarn to tell.

But there are many layers to his personality, such as his passion for the environment and his football charity, Global United FC.

“I was on a radio programme on the BBC which was a little bit serious and this lady came on ranting at me for being a bad person for taking the penguin.

“I agreed it was a big mistake but then I pointed out that I have also founded one of the biggest football charities in the world. I’ve been to places like Pakistan and pulled out dead bodies with my bare hands, I’ve worked on plenty of my own social projects in some of the hardest townships in Africa.

“Because I went to so many places all over the world, you see the problems that exist.

“You talk to English and German people and they always find something to complain about. It’s raining, we pay too much tax, there are too many foreigners.

“But look at the people who are really struggling and where every day is about survival. So we’ve got nothing to be unhappy about.

“Top class footballers can reach out to everybody. You would be surprised how many footballers changed a little bit of their thinking after working with the organisation – guys who had six or seven cars before, now they have one.”

Which brings us neatly back to Antarctica and plans to stage a game on the runway of a research station airport to highlight the threat of climate change. It sounds like just another day for football’s globe-trotter extraordinaire.