I was 11 years old when the wall came down; though my understanding of the political meaning was largely vague, the significance of the event somehow did not pass me by. A friend's father was in the army and posted to Germany - being an enterprising sort of chap, he began selling chunks of the wall around class.
This is mine, it's not much to look at, it can be held in the palm of your hand; when I got it it still smelled of the aerosol paint with which the Berliners had daubed it in its final days.
It sits on a shelf in my living room nowadays, just a small, anonymous piece of concrete that I walk past many times a week, but which some may once have died trying to pass.
It makes me think of freedom, and how much I have always taken it for granted, and it makes me think of the division walls that still exist in the world.
Share this link: