The clue to this picture is in the top right corner. Never mind the garish colour scheme, look at the shape and note the rounded off concrete at the top. It is on a wall approximately twelve feet high. This was designed to be impossible to scale by an unaided human being, no matter how desperate. It was actually tested by asking the top athletes available to the regime to attempt to get over it. Of course it’s the Berlin Wall.

The photo was taken in 1990 after I had just got off the Trans Siberian express. A year after the wall had come down, also a year after the events at Tianamen square. Very shortly after the liberation there was a joyful explosion of colourful creativity by the hitherto suppressed artists from the east. The murals stretched for hundreds of yards: outrageous ones of political figures, outrageously colourful and surreal ones such as these cheerful forky banana heads. I loved it.

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