Speech
Thank you for the introduction, and the kind invitation to come back and visit King’s. It’s an honour to speak here today, and I am looking forward to our fireside chat and taking your questions.
For me, King’s will always be a place of warm memories. It was on another October day, four decades ago, that I went up to Cambridge to read for the Mathematical Tripos. In 1984 I arrived at the gate from a small coal-mining village in Yorkshire with my happy but nervous parents in tow. I was the first in my family line to go to university, so it was a moment of great anticipation and anxiety, for them as much as for me, as I crossed that threshold. But we need not have worried—from day one, I could not have felt more at home in this college, nor more welcomed by students, fellows, and staff.
Arriving at King’s on that first day, and then as time passed, and even a little bit today, I always had a sense of wonder walking in through the Porters’ Lodge, thinking: I maybe do not know what comes next, what I will learn, or where I will go, but I sure am excited to find out. It’s a great institution that can make you feel that way, and I am very thankful.
Well, the journey, intellectual or otherwise, hopefully never ends – for me or for you – and I feel fortunate to be back here today following a career that has taken me around the world, studying and researching economics as an academic, and now, since last year, as a policymaker at the Bank of England on the Monetary Policy Committee.
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