"You never step into the same river twice - but you come out richer in experiences, ideas, and friends." Why did these texts become a book? In 1994, along with two other friends, I visited the paternal home of one of them, a farm on top of a hill in a small village in Wales. It was the time when all three of us were writing our doctoral theses. Our host's father, the night after our pub visit, half-jokingly said, "My father used to say that every man [I know, sexist, but that's how the old folks used to say it] should plant a tree, have a child, and write a book. You three started the other way around." We explained to him that a doctoral thesis doesn't count as a book. Since then, I have planted several trees and had two children, so I thought that maybe a collection of texts might count as a book after all."