 First and foremost, you've done it. Congratulations to this year's graduates and to their faculty, friends and family who have supported them along the way. The fact we are unable to celebrate in person with ceremony pomp and gowns does not in any way diminish the magnitude of your achievements, nor does it lessen my heartfelt gratitude for this extraordinary honour. The moment I learned there was a school of Oriental and African studies. I knew this was where I wanted to be. And while my own graduation was a long time ago, my sense of pride and wonder of having been a student here are still very fresh. So as opened doors for me has allowed me to chart my own course and meant that in the furthest reaches of the world I have been able to introduce myself to extraordinary, unique, diverse and lovingly formidable, according to my husband, individuals with a cheery, I was at Soast too. My entry into Soast, however, is a bit of a mystery. I am far from being naturally academic and am dyslexic to boot. In fact, at our first wine and cheese, when introduced to the then head of the department, the rather scary Professor John Weeks, he said, ah, you're the one we let in because you were so damn confident we figured you had to have something to offer. But it's true. I bulldozed determinedly forward in my attempts to compensate and dissemble. I had a plan. A logical series of boxes that needed to be tipped to get to the lofty heights I was going. Happily, life and a few hard knocks got in the way. Starting with the very first moment I mounted the steps into the main college building. As a graduate student, I had been planning to audit and learn Arabic for the purely practical reason that it was one of the six official languages of the United Nations. But on my way up those stairs, I passed a young woman carefully practicing her Burmese lines of beautiful, complex, exotic loops and circles. Soast is not for box-tickers. At its heart, Soast is about beautiful, complex, exotic people. Their past, politics, poverty and power, where and how they live, the music, art and literature that brings us all joy, speaks of pain and helps to build movements. Soast celebrates the curious and embraces the activist many other institutions do not and prepares you for pathways in life that loop and circle as you learn, explore, grow, re-evaluate and stay wide open to the unexpected. I have done my best to keep these traits at the heart of what I do, be curious and wide open to people, not numbers, data points or boxes. My loopy path has led me to the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and girls which necessarily includes everyone and everything she cares about and is responsible for. Women, girls and their newborn babies and fragile and humanitarian settings are amongst the most neglected individuals and yet contribute and have the most to offer. It is with them that you will find this, Sir Usgrad. So fabulous class of 2021. Congratulations once again. Thank you for this great honour and now get out there celebrate and cheer for the introduce yourself.