For more than 10 years, I had an office on the first floor of the University of Bristol English Department, which is located in a large 19th-century villa on a road in Clifton, the wealthiest suburb of the city. The front entrance to the building is a more recent glass structure that sits between two older buildings. Throughout the day, staff, students and visitors come and go – and on the hour, as lectures or seminars start and end, large waves of people pass by. There is a desk, where the porters who are on duty sit, but there is no formal reception area.

There was one student who, no matter how often she came to see me, would never just turn up and knock on my office door. Instead, Nina would wait for a porter, and then ask them to ring up and tell me she had arrived. She was the only student I knew who did this, and I found it such a baffling ritual that I did not say anything for a long time. In the fourth year of her degree, Nina was around 15 minutes late for a meeting with me, because there had not been a porter on duty when she arrived. In exasperation, I said: “You don’t need to wait – you can just come and knock on my door.”

Several years later, I asked Nina to speak on a panel about black and minority ethnic (BME) experience at the university. The university’s Students’ Union had recently published a report on this topic (Bristol SU, 2016), which found that students often felt isolated ‘due to being the only, or one of a few, BME students in a room’ and that ‘many students reported feeling that they couldn’t be “completely themselves”’ (p 15). Students also reported experiences of direct racism and racist micro-aggressions and the survey raised concerns about mental health.

Nina talked about her educational history at the event, some of which I had heard before. She is in her forties and left school without qualifications, in part due to dyslexia, which was only diagnosed in her thirties. She spent years being late, she said, because she had to ask other people for the time, as she could not read a clock.