I was 18, a callow youth, instead of now, a callow adult.

It was 1975 and I’d spent 3 months on a kibbutz – it’s what we did before they invented gap years – with other volunteers from all over the world. Our last week was for us, and we hitch-hiked south and made it to Jerusalem. There was a café in the Old Town called Uncle Moustache because the owner – a big, friendly Palestinian – had…yep, a big moustache. We ate falafel and pitta bread and thick sludgy coffee where the grounds clogged your mouth.

I tried to donate blood. I wasn’t broke but it was a rite of passage, or would have been, but the doctor tested my blood and said he didn’t want it. ‘Hippy blood,’ he said, and to this day I still don’t know what he meant.

I walked the crowded alleys and bazaars and ended up at the Western Wall, new camera in hand – a Nikkormat Ftn with 50mm lens and saw her, big bandage and all. She may be Jewish – probably is, or was, it’s a long time ago – but it’s not about religion or race or anything else that divides us. She’s my mother, she’s your mother, she’s everyone’s mother, a mother for all humankind, weeping and praying for what has happened to the world. 

It was shot on Kodachrome 25, the film that everyone used – slow as fuck but sharp and rich and deep – a slide as we called it, transparency if we wanted to be cool and sound like a pro. 

It’s one of my earliest photographs and still one of my favourites. It’s digitised now, preserved forever I hope on my hard drive or in the cloud – the transparency maybe lost but possibly hiding in a dusty shoebox in the loft.