 Well, it's very moving for me to be here. Graduands, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, it's a great honor and a pleasure to be with you all today as we celebrate the achievements of SOA students and pay tribute to the support of family and friends. Graduation is always a special time. We all regret that our President, Dane Grassa-Machel is unable to be with us this year, but it gives me a wonderful opportunity to again be part of a unique SOAS occasion. I have a special affection for SOAS. More than 50 years ago, I was allowed to use the library and to take books home, even though I wasn't a student. I was working on a cookbook on Middle Eastern food, and there I found the history and the cultures that shaped the cuisines I was researching. It was a great honor then to be invited to become an honorary fellow more than half a century later and recently to give a centenary lecture about the role of food in culture. I keep being drawn to SOAS by talks on Middle East and on food and by events in the Jewish Music Institute. SOAS is one of the finest universities in the world, truly global in scope and reach with its distinct specialist knowledge of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. It offers a truly distinctive opportunity for students and academic staff to experience every day the interaction, connectivity, and exposure which is a microcosm of today's world. For more than 100 years, SOAS has been at the forefront of specialist scholarship on the languages, cultures, societies, politics, and economics of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. It's rare to find a place with such a rich diversity of cultures and backgrounds, and where learning and critical thinking are nurtured and enhanced. What makes SOAS particularly special is its global perspective. Our world needs people who can build bridges across communities and cultures and really make a difference. And you now have the, you graduands now have the tools to do that. As a Jew from Arab lands who has known happy times in the Muslim world and experienced the pain and dislocation of forced displacement, I know how important those bridges are. I was born in Egypt and have only happy memories of my childhood there. The Egypt I knew was a cosmopolitan and multicultural society. There were long standing communities of Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Syrians, and Lebanese living among the Muslim and Coptic population. The royal family was an Ottoman-Albanian dynasty and the aristocracy was Turkish. The Jewish community was itself a mosaic of families from all over the old Ottoman Empire that had joined the ancient indigenous community. Three of my grandparents came from Aleppo where my great-grandfather was the chief rabbi. My maternal grandmother was from Istanbul. People spoke many languages and French was the lingua franca. Whilst we all had our own separate identities, we shared a space and a time in history and we shared a culture. The way we befaved towards each other, kindly, respectfully, graciously, the way we laughed and told jokes, the way we entertained, hospitality was all important. We got on and enriched each other's lives. I might even say we loved each other, some of us at least. I have to be careful what I say. An Israeli newspaper translated into Hebrew that I said we adored each other. Well, I was studying art in London when the Jews had to leave Egypt on Mars in 1956 after the Suez Crisis and my parents arrived as refugees leaving everything behind. My life was swamped with waves of relatives and friends. Everyone wondering where to go, which country would allow them to settle. People were asking each other for recipes in a desperate kind of way. Give me your recipe for kibbeh, your lahmabeah jeen, your orange cake, your hummus. I might never see you again. It will be something to remember you by. There had been no cookbooks. Recipes had been handed down in families. That is when I started collecting recipes. It was my way of holding on to my lost world, of keeping ties with people that I would be losing. After years of collecting from many sources, when I told English friends that I was working on a Middle Eastern cookbook, some would say, is it going to be eyeballs and testicles? And why don't you paint? Because I had been at art school. London was not then the world capital of gastronomy it is today. Food in Britain was horrible at the time. I can say it now because it's all changed. Being a chef was the lowest job. Writing about food, the lowest thing. Talking about food, embarrassing. And no one wanted to cook anything from the Middle East. I put bits of history, poems, riddles and stories in among the recipes so that readers would realize that the food was part of a rich and beautiful civilization. And they might then like to cook some of it. So it was a surprise to read in the Guardian in 2013 that 41% of homes in the UK had hummus in their fridge. It might be more than 41% today. What started for me as a labor of love that made us happy became a way of discovering the world. I traveled around the Mediterranean. I tasted everything I could and asked everybody I met what their favorite dishes were. It gave me a reason to as a woman traveling alone to accost people on a train, in a restaurant, on a bench and to engage them in conversation. I'm an English food writer researching your cuisine. People were glad to talk about their food and their lives were stranger. They didn't always believe I was English though. They sometimes invited me home to eat and let me watch while they cooked. Eating delicious food and the special conviviality around food is one of the great joys of life. But part of the pleasure of researching food has been for me getting to know people and being part of their lives for a moment. It opened doors. I discovered that food had the power to bring people together and make them feel loved and valued. That it had the power to celebrate identity and at the same time build bridges and create bonds between people and different communities. I'm not telling you to be a chef or a food writer but you can do worse than learn to cook. There are many ways though to build bridges. I use food. You are equipped with languages and many other wonderful tools to break barriers and build bridges. My advice to you for a happy and successful life is to do what you love and to be true to yourself. Achieve great things and have fun. Be rich and famous if you want but don't forget love and kindness and being human. What will bring you most happiness and fulfillment is a life with meaning and purpose. Build bridges when you can and you can change the world. Congratulations to each and every one of our graduands. You will always be part of SOAS and SOAS will always be part of you.