Will Hughes sent me a picture of him together with one of his research teams at the University of Reading, where we had taught together for many years. As far as I can guess, the team is made up of doctoral students. Five of them are sitting at a round table with Will while one of them is taking the picture. But what a team it is! There are two men from Africa, a man and a woman from Asia, and a woman from either the Middle East or South America. Well, she could be from Southern Europe, too. After so many years in Motovun, I am stunned by the racial diversity of Reading. While I was living there, most likely I would not even notice this feature of Will’s picture. The students would strike me as, well, ordinary. Run of the mill. As I foresaw before leaving Reading five years ago, it was the racial diversity that I would miss most. And so it actually is. Painfully so, too.

Addendum (February 26, 2008)

I could not wait for Will to stumble upon this piece on the World Wide Web, and so I sent him its address. As it turned out, only one person in the picture is a doctoral student. All the others already have their doctoral degrees. They are on the research staff in my old department in Reading, and they all work on one of Will’s projects. Now, the picture was taken by a researcher from Germany. The other researchers are from Nigeria, Ghana, Taiwan, China, and Iran. So, the only woman I could not place with any degree of precision even on continental scale is actually Persian. What a team, indeed. “Really wonderful,” writes Will, “I agree. We socialize quite a lot, and I am always the only English person present.”