I don’t think I have mentioned it before, but my village is probably one of the most beautiful in the Caribbean. This is a relatively recent thing, due to the specific human and physical geography of the place, and it is part of my job here to discover the precise process by which it became so beautiful.

The stereotype of a beautiful Caribbean village might be a quaint fishing village surrounded by vast, empty expanses of white sand, bordered on one side by turquoise clear water, and by swaying palm trees on the other. If this is your idea of Caribbean beauty, let me recommend either Boca de Yuma in the southeast DR, or Rincon on the Samana peninsula. However, this vision is most certainly not applicable to my village, as it is over 4,000ft up in the mountains, and very close to a monument that marks the centre point of the DR, and therefore the furthest distance from the sea of any point of in the Caribbean archipelago. Rather, what makes this village so special is a specific change in the agrarian economy, combined with the unique microclimate of the area.

The little valley that my village occupies is the first dip after the vast rise of the outermost slope of the cordillera as it emerges almost vertically from the Cibao plain. This makes it the first rest that air masses get after they rise up the steep incline, producing a microclimate that a tourist board or real estate salesman might describe as “refreshing and well watered”, or “cold and wet” to the rest of us. This might sound miserable, and it sometimes is, but when the rest of the country is sweltering in the tropical heat, we up here remain fresh and comfortable. It is our little secret, and it is why rich city dwellers who are in on the secret have built weekend homes up here.

About twenty years or so ago, when most of the villagers were living from producing root crops such as yucca, supplemented by bean growing and keeping cattle, someone worked out that this climate was perfect for growing the flowers that had become a commercial crop in North America and Europe. Over time, other people noticed the success this person was having, and as new varieties and growing techniques emerged, eventually almost the whole village was growing flowers. Now, as I walk through the village, I am surrounded by roses, anthulia, lilies and a whole number of flowers that I don’t know the name for in English, but are nonetheless rather beautiful.

This has also represented an improvement in the lives of villagers, as these flowers sell well in the markets of the big cities of Santo Domingo and Santiago. There are certain high points, such as the Christmas party season, Mothers’ day, and of course Valentine’s day, when the price of roses can increase tenfold. Throughout the year, although the market has its ups and downs, flowers always sell. As one villager put it, “people are always falling in love and getting married, and people are always dying and having funerals”. Daily I see my friends carrying bundles of freshly cut flowers to be taken down to market that night and sold the next morning to the florists of the cities. If a single flower can be beautiful, seeing a van stacked with hundreds of lilies or thousands of roses is certainly very impressive. A field of swaying gladioli is a nice sight to see on one’s way to work.

The flowers that don’t make it to market, the lilies with too short a stem, the roses that can’t quite make up a dozen, are not thrown away, but rather decorate the tables of every household in the village. When one enters the house of a friend here, if it doesn’t smell of freshly made coffee, it is filled with the sweet scent of lilies or roses.

The downside of this, as a friend told me, is that such abundance of flowers makes it more difficult for the men folk to think of a present to charm the ladies.

I have recently been surprised by how my chicken has turned from a fluffy little bundle of feathers into a psychopathic sadistic rapist.

Chickens are generally considered as comedy animals, frequently portrayed through animations, butt of jokes, and subject to philosophical musings as to their attitude towards traversing transport infrastructure. They certainly don’t deserve this cuddly representations, as they are amongst the most evil creatures around. Some creatures, such as snakes and crocodiles, get lots of bad press, but many other animals deserve it just as much. I wonder what the conservation community would think if it were suddenly discovered that Pandas, far from being cute and cuddly, were actually cannibals and devil worshippers.

When I first got my first chicken, he was thin, gangling thing, who ate everything I threw at him. He would come to my house several times a day to eat some corn, and would spend the rest of the time wandering around under the trees by the river. Recently he seems to have grown up from this child-like existence into a fury of very adult behaviours.

He still comes to the house several times a day to get his meals, but whenever he does I make sure that my neighbours cocks are not around. Before, if they were around he would not come to eat, and he would run away if they approached him, but now he is grown up he has got cocky and has no fear at all. The result of this is that he has been fighting with the neighbours, which has been very messy.

What few people realise is that male chickens can be very aggressive and prone to fighting, but most frightening of all is that when they fight, they will carry not stop until one of them is dead. For this reason most people keep their cocks tied up, but I had let mine run free because he was a shy, weak creature. Now that he is a fully fledged psychopath, he has taken advantage of this freedom to square up to the neighbours, and get into some impressive scraps. Someone was passing recently when he squared up to the neighbour, so they were separated before it got to the point when one of them was dead, but still there was a considerable amount of blood splattered around the place. From time to time someone’s cock breaks free from its moorings, and roams around picking fights. Quite often there is no one to break them up, and so people just discover a corpse with another chicken continuing to peck and slash at it long after it has perished.

Whereas my innocent childish chicken would wander down by the river, scratching at the ground under the trees for some scraps to eat, the adult that it has grown into prefers to spend time in the field across the road, where the old lady keeps her poultry to produce the eggs that provides her income. She has a rather large collection of rather fine hens, and the little psychopath has been having his way with them. I see him chasing after them as they try to run away, when he grabs their neck with his beak, throws them to the ground, and leaps on top of them. He seems to manage to rape a good few hens a day, and crows loudly at his achievements.

I have a good mind to go across to claim half of the eggs as my property.

I am not one to anthropomorphise animals, but I wonder what sort of person my chicken would be. I think that he is the sort of small, hairy aggressive person you frequently find in Scottish pubs, squat powderkegs just waiting to go off. The sort of people you take the long way round back from the bar just to avoid, lest it result in a spilt drink or other minor infringement that would always escalate into a situation with a corpse (yours), with another person continuing to kick and slash at it long after it has perished.

I have recently bought a pair of very young hens, which are rapidly growing up into a future meal. They are stupid creatures that spend the day eating lots and scratching around in the grass outside my house. No trouble at all, which is the way I like my chickens.

Today, once again, a very famous and rich Dominican who has a weekend home in the village urged me to father a child here before I finish my fieldwork. Apparently, this village is lacking in Scottish DNA and I should do my duty to fill this hole. I smiled politely and said that I was working on it, and would continue to do so at the dance hall that night. Of course, I was lying. Just because he has doesn’t mean that I should follow his example.

Many people here ask me where I learnt to speak Spanish, and I am quite chuffed to say that this is normally accompanied by a comment on the quality of it. For those of you who don’t know, I learnt about six words in five years of study at high school, which was followed by a near-vertical learning curve when I went off to study geography at a university in Spain.

Cantabria, the province where I lived in Spain, is considered to be the cradle of the modern Spanish language. The political process that created the modern kingdom of Spain started there, a mechanism that consisted of either attacking neighbouring kingdoms or marrying their princesses (after all, all is fair in love and war). People there are very proud that theirs is a pure and noble strain of Spanish, perhaps an equivalent would be BBC English. This is the idiom and accent that I picked up in my time there, the way that s is pronounced halfway between s and sh in English, z and c pronounced like th, and the difficult to grasp soft d in the word Madrid. Refined, elegant, clear and generally rather fine.

However, coming here has had a rather disastrous effect, as this has become tainted by Caribbean Spanish, which is treated with the same incomprehension and semi-disguised disgust as Geordies are in English. Moreover, I am living with isolated mountain communities whose dictation has suffered the same fate as their genetic variation – it has become very messy, and rather limited. When I first got here things were a bit difficult, but I have become accustomed to this hillbilly/Geordie Spanish. Indeed, I don’t think I have pronounced an s or a t for several months now.

As well as loosing consonants, I have picked up some of the very specific words that are used up here, particularly the obscure ones used to describe agricultural activities. In their own way, these are rather poetic, and last week I made a concerted effort to learn the local variations on tree names, which include Man’s Face, Green Ebony, and Wood of the Cross (apparently, if planted next to your house it is guaranteed to keep witches away. I am tempted to plant one outside my office in Manchester to ensure that certain staff members leave me alone).

With Haiti as a neighbour, sometime ruler and general strong influence, Dominican Spanish contains words that have come via a convoluted journey from France and West Africa, as well as a smattering of words that originate from the various US invasions and from US hemispheric hegemony generally. There are also quite a few indigenous words that have survived the complete elimination of the previous occupants within fifty years of Columbus arriving. Some of these have even made it into English, including papaya, Jamaica, savannah, and more bizarrely, hammock and barbecue. However, with the large number of Haitian immigrants working in agriculture in the area, many of my neighbours who employ, work with or otherwise deal with them have come to learn no small amount of Kreyol, and this has become a regular feature of village conversations. Kreyol words have even managed to usurp their Spanish equivalents – nowadays no one in the village talks about eating their desayuno in the morning, but rather their manje. Crazy people are not loco but fou, and so on.

Given that these words are used mainly as a form of slang, and given the sort of thing that slang is perhaps best at dealing with, most of the Kreyol words I have picked up are part of the virtually unlimited variation referring to a very limited selection of the human anatomy. As my mother reads this, I am not going to go into details.

A central part of what it is to be a geographer, a central part of what defines our discipline, is the experience of going a doing fieldwork. Traditionally, this would involve going to far flung places, and bringing back carefully drawn maps, stories of the natives, and a veritable medley of diseases and parasites. Deep within our soul is a vision of ourselves hacking though jungle wearing a pith helmet, and it remains there despite the cultural influence of four wheel drives and Gore-Tex.

The process of research has traditionally been to formulate some theories about a particular place, then go there only to find that reality gets in the way of carefully constructed theory. The solution has traditionally been to wander around getting hot/cold/wet/ill/pregnant or any combination of these, until the right answer is deduced. Apparently it is all a character building experience, and makes us what we are.

When I was doing research at the place previous to my current employment, when I was in a geography department rather than a development institute (whatever that is), myself and my colleagues had a huge variety of places of work. Some would hang around in Antarctica for months on end, others would sweat in the Amazon (where the disease and parasite opportunities are varied and virtually limitless), with other trips to South Sea islands, Patagonian mountains, Faroese fishing villages, African deserts and so on. What they would return with was generally welcome; nice pictures, great stories, and exotic bottles of alcohol. The exception was the infamous and virulent strain of typhoid brought back from the Amazon which resulted in the whole office becoming quarantined.

Geography as a discipline has moved on from more traditional fieldwork, and now we often work in less traditional environments, such as public parks, red light districts and so on. One colleague spent the best part of a year travelling around university libraries in the US, looking for copies of a geography book from the 1930s, more specifically examples with graffiti in the margins.

The important thing is not necessarily where we go, and what we do, but the fact that we actually do leave our offices. The tradition of fieldwork is deeply ingrained, and it is too valuable an experience to loose. One of the most important implications of it was highlighted recently in the Times supplement, which advised women who are looking for a good looking, tanned, educated, well-travelled, entertaining and intelligent man, to look no further than the meetings of the Royal Geographical Society. As I have the letters FRGS after my name (Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society), I am proud to be continuing the tradition of good looking, tanned, educated, well-travelled, entertaining and intelligent geographers.

Why they chose to highlight the meetings of the RGS is beyond me, as they are generally populated by the bearded sub-species of geographer, but the principle remains that geographers are damn sexy.

In my current institution, I am surrounded by economists, people with business degrees and those specialising in that most condescendingly titled discipline; human resource management. Frankly, none of these will ever be sexy, particularly those who treat people as resources to be managed. What unites these people is that they can write their research, spend three years doing a PhD, without leaving their office, but instead over-analysing statistics and so on. They become pale, boring, obsessive people, with a blinkered perspective on the world. In particular, I find economists distinctly un-sexy, as these are people who think that the world can be understood through looking at statistics, rather than the world itself. I recently came across an individual who was finishing their PhD at an American university, where the process is slower, lasting around five years. Their area of interest was the growth of the Indian economy, and they had spent half a decade researching this topic, but without actually going to India. The economists in the audience at this event couldn’t see the problem with this, but the rest of the people were absolutely horrified at this arrogant attitude that the world can be experienced and understood at a distance, through numbers. It is like people who think that they can understand the wonder of the ceiling of the Sistine chapel through photographs of it, rather than going and seeing it in three dimensions, surrounded by the context of a chapel and a city.

And that, dear friends, is why you should never date an economist, but should instead aim your amorous intentions towards geographers.

I have always been a bit of a feminist, but being a male feminist is a bit problematic. For a start, sisters who are doing it for themselves aren’t always looking for encouragement from men, but quite the opposite. Out here in rural DR, my feminist political beliefs are challenged by the sheer machismo of society here. Most of my male neighbours up here think that giving votes to women is political correctness gone mad.

A general prevailing mood here is that women only serve for sex and food, and so those with big hips are highly valued, as not only does it shows good child bearing potential, but it is the physical manifestation of good domestic produce, the layers of sediment resulting from many great meals. I once overheard some sleazy gringos commenting how they find it odd that Dominicans prefer larger prostitutes, as they think they are getting more for their money. If this is the case, and this is certainly not an area which I am researching, then it explains why the village prostitute does such good business, as following this line of logic she represents an absolute bargain. Actually, she seems pleasant enough – she works out of the drinking establishment next to my house, so I speak to her on a daily basis as I leave to go out. I only wish that she would realise that she isn’t ever going to get any business from me, and that she would stop groping my posterior.

It is perfectly acceptable for a man here to have as many girlfriends as he can afford, as long as the wife doesn’t find out. Needless to say, the same freedom is not extended to women. It is normally an economic limitation on girlfriends, as one friend told me he had to stop seeing one girlfriend in a village down the road as he couldn’t afford to keep paying for things for her, but that he aimed to get back with her when his business picked up. I hear he is getting a good price for his produce nowadays, which is probably why I often see him on his motorbike, heading down the road.

What gets my goat is the idea here that the wife, in cases where she discovers the philandering nature of her fella, is expected to just put up with it. A story went round recently about one woman who discovered that her man had been playing away from home, and in retaliation she cut up all his clothes with a pair of scissors. Although this is not a particularly hellishly furious reaction from a scorned woman, up here it is something akin to the combination of burning your bra whilst jumping in front of the King’s horse. As I heard this story, I was about to make a comment about what a great Sister this woman is, and how it is good that she did something, but before I could do so the rest of the room started going on about what a right so-and-so she is, doing that to her man, destroying his nice clothes. The proper reaction was to do nothing, other than sweep the house and prepare his rice and beans (but without putting cyanide in it).

This viewing of women as objects for sexual conquest is one trend that crosses class boundaries. I was told by one of the rich people who own weekend homes up here, that before I leave the country, I should father a child with a woman from the village – he did, and he didn’t regret it in the slightest. There are eight or so weekend homes in the village, and there are at least two children who have resulted from the brief and illicit union between a rich city dweller and a local girl. Meanwhile several of the villagers have advised me that I should sleep with one of the Haitian women who work in the fields here, particularly on cold nights, as the darker a woman’s skin is, the more heat she is presumed to give off. I am sure that I do not need to inform you that I have followed neither of these pieces of advice.

Of course, there are also some places where woman are simply not expected to be. For example, no women are expected to be seen at the drinking area where the billiard table is, with the exception of teenage girls who can play during the day when men are not there. Likewise, no reputable woman would ever go to a cockfight, which is certainly a very macho environment. The exception to these is, of course, disreputable women. The cockfighting arena for the whole valley is in my village, and so on Sundays, when they put on the fights, all the prostitutes for the whole area come to ply their trade in the arena and the neighbouring billiards place. Sundays are certainly not a day of rest for them.

A friend of mine, who is certainly a proactive feminist type, once went to a cockfight in the DR. She is a particularly pale gringa, so she must have flipped out the locals with the unprecedented spectacle of a woman in attendance who is not only not a prostitute, but also an Americana. Mind you, this is the girl who plays golf in tweeds and pearls, just to wind up the old boys at the club, her particular take on subversive action.

I don’t think Dominican society is ready for my radical idea that women should be treated as the equals of men. That is currently an unimaginable situation, not least for the women of the village.

A standard activity of the middle class students that I have the joy to teach back in the UK is the taking of a “gap year”, between school and university. This might involve travelling round the world working and partying, combined with doing some of charity work in a poor country. Ostensibly this is to give them a chance to mature by seeing more of the world, in particular to gain a sense of perspective from spending time with less privileged people. However, judging by the comments that some of them put into their essays, it seems to generally have the opposite effect. This is perhaps because they apparently spend most of the time hanging around and drinking with the sort of person that they hung around with at school, and will hang around and drink with at university, except in a sunnier climate.

Now, doing the sort of work that I do gives me the right, perhaps even the obligation, to be cynical about the whole development arena, and projects like gap year students in particular. Along with membership of professional bodies, subscription to relevant journals comes a free invitation to join the “Make Geldof History” campaign. Of course, you could be cynical about my work, but that would be pointless as I am already far more cynical about it than you could ever possibly be. Despite this general rancour, there is something particular about people who go to teach English to school children as volunteers that really makes me angry at the futility and self-righteousness of it all.

In the first class with my first year students, I always ask them about their educational background, so I can adjust my teaching accordingly. Every time I hear the phrase “I spent a gap year teaching English to orphaned orang-utans” (or similar) I make a mental note to take 10% of all the marks of that student, just for being so irritating. What makes it so particularly annoying is not the will to help, which should be applauded and encouraged, but the self-righteousness that accompanies it. The whole industry that entices students into paying thousands of pounds to undertake this trip maintains the lie that the recipients of these classes receive more from this than the volunteers themselves. Their brochures are full of phrases such as “when I taught them a few phrases, their little faces lit up, and I could see how much they gained from the experience”. One could make the point that the students might be better off receiving free health care and half decent job prospects than a few phrases of a language they will never speak again, but this would expose the economic dynamic that underlies this phenomenon. Put simply, the students, mainly because of their age and experience, have nothing more to offer than language teaching, and so this multi-million pound industry of sending the young British middle class abroad is driven not by need in the recipient countries, but by demand for a character building experience in the UK. In times past, the young British middle class were sent abroad to get another type of character building experience, as military officers they would shoot natives to maintain the great British Empire, but the current system isn’t that much of an improvement. It is not just us who do it, last time I was on research in the mountains of the DR I met a middle aged woman from Atlanta who had decided to take a month of work to come and teach English at a rural Dominican school. Of course, she spoke almost no Spanish, had no teaching experience, and had made no contact with the school that she intended to teach in. She just thought it was sufficient to turn up and get going, and this would alleviate her conscience for a while. She was “giving something back” – what, and to whom, was not up for discussion.

What gives me the right to take such a position is that for the last few months I have been working as a volunteer one morning per week, giving English classes. This is because many of the parents have been asking me to do this, and it is one particular thing that I can do to directly do something for the community, without compromising my research. Mainly however, it gives me a legitimate excuse to do something other than my own work. The Dominican government, as usual demonstrating its infinite wisdom, has decided that all students should study English, but haven’t bothered to provide the qualified teachers or resources. The job in the school down the road was left to the maths teacher, who tries his best but himself only speaks a few phrases, and the books are old, tattered, and few and far between. I have been thrust into this void of knowledge, and have been trying to fill it with usefulness and enthusiasm. Mainly I have been failing.

Now, as some of you might know, and the rest would have guessed, I was not a good child at school. In fact, I recall being threatened with expulsion on more than one occasion. I feel that Karma has come to teach me a lesson in behaviour they could never teach me whilst I was at school. Rather than “their little faces lighting up”, when I attempt to teach a few phrases to the students, they ignore this as the boys are too busy throwing objects at other boys, or trying to flirt with the girls, whilst the girls are busy dodging thrown objects and flirtatious comments whilst engaging in gossip. It is not the rewarding (and easy) task that people may lead to you believe. In the long run it should provide me with some benefits, as I will get ever closer to understanding, and perhaps even empathising, with my students.

In one of today’s classes, I was teaching how to describe someone, so that next week we could play a game of Guess Who? I got the students, who were about age 16 in this class, to give me the name of a body part that we could learn to describe.

Of course, the first thing that was shouted out was “ass”, as boys will be boys. I thought about correcting him, to tell him the proper pronunciation of the posterior is “arse”, but remembered I am supposed to be teaching ‘Mercan English, so I let the ‘error’ stand.

Last Tuesday, the 27^th of February, was a national holiday here for Independence day, marking the day one hundred and sixty or so years ago, when they first attempted to establish an entity called the Dominican Republic. The land that is currently the DR had up till that point been invaded several times by Spain, France, Haiti and England. Later rulers would then try and sell the country, or parts of it, to Spain, France and the USA, whilst the USA would invade twice. Oddly, the first Spanish colony in the New World is the only one to have not declared independence from Spain, as Haiti was the incumbent ruler at the time when the attempts to establish the DR first took place. Interestingly, one thing that many Dominicans forget is that one of the first things the new rulers did was to try and sell the newly independent colony back to Spain.

The event was marked here in the mountains by all the school children drawing flags at school and parading up and down the road waving them. The radio and television was full of messages of sincere looking pundits telling us how we should be patriotic and love our country. This is part of a wider system of enforcing nationalism, present in all forms of life here from the unsubtle messages about loving your country in the text books to the government funded quangos who exist solely to promote patriotism. I have written before on my discomfort with Dominican nationalism and the veneration of “the hero of the independence” – Juan Pablo Duarte, in particular the uncritical worship of “patriotic heroes”, and the lack of critical thinking about the country’s history and sense of identity. For example, Duarte was a minor player in the independence movement, was quickly sidelined by the rest of the revolutionaries, and is only venerated because of the rest of the revolutionaries turned out to be a rather nasty lot and it would be too embarrassing to worship them. History has thrust greatness upon him, yet he doesn’t deserve it. Rather than being a bunch of patriots (to a country that didn’t yet exist), the revolutionaries were rich landowners who were worried about the Haitian occupiers’ plans for land reform, backed by the Catholic church who were angry at the removal of the huge political power they enjoyed under Spanish rule. In much the same way that the leaders of the US revolution were not patriots, but a bunch of tax dodgers. Incidentally, as they seem so incapable of ruling themselves, we Britishers are going to revoke their independence. We would also like £752,291,184,290,437,613 in back taxes paid promptly. Cheques should be sent to Betty Windsor, Buck House, London.

Dominicans have little idea of what it is to be Dominican, and this is never talked about, yet it is enough to deny Dominican citizenship to hundreds of thousands of people of Haitian descent, despite being clearly in breach of the constitution. Instead, people here are just ordered to ‘be Dominican’ without asking what this is.

This year marks three hundred years since the end of the country of my birth, Scotland, and the beginning of the country of my citizenship, the United Kingdom, and accompanying this has been a increase in volume of the omnipresent discussions on Scottish identity and independence. Whilst there are many inconsistencies and problems with Scottish national identity, mainly caused by Australian film directors, we don’t have either Scottish or British nationalism forced down our throats, and we are always debating what this constitutes. Those who criticise dominant views are given the opportunities to make television programmes and write books, yet if someone was to write what I have just written criticising Dominican national identity they would be lynched.

Just as well that no one reads this blog.

One of the benefits of living in this particular community is that the owner of the local electricity company (and owner of much else besides) has a weekend home close by. This means that in order to keep the neighbours happy, he ensures that we have a good electricity supply. Until recently, this meant the flow starting at 1PM prompt, and ends around 1AM, yet in recent weeks starting and ending times have been much more capricious, coming and going several times a day, never at the same time. This prompts the two Dominican catch-phrases “se fue la luz” and “se llega la luz” – “the power has gone”, and “the power has arrived”. This is present in every area of the Dominican Republic, except the apartment complexes of the rich and the all-inclusive tourist resorts, which can afford enough inverters and portable generators to get them through any blackout. It is much more severe in rural areas, perhaps because the deadly riots in protest against poor supply that have plagued the DR have all occurred in the large cities, rather than the remote campo. The peasants never seem to be revolting.

Electricity supply is a major political issue here, and the candidates for the presidential elections are slinging promises to the electorate and insults at each other with all the force and none of the accuracy of a baseball pitcher, even though the elections are fourteen months away. Each is promising to end power outages whilst criticising the vacuity of the plans of the other, as they know it is the key to electoral success. The politician who can ensure power to the people will be in turn given power by the people.

Apart from the catch-phrases, a far more audible sign that power has arrived in the village is that all the tape decks and CD players are cranked up, and the valley suddenly fills with music. This is mainly bachata, Dominican country music, which is quite pleasant, except when it is the same five-song CD repeated on an endless loop. Even though it disturbs the tranquil peace of the village, the songs seems totally at place, as they are about campo life, about working the fields, drinking rum, and having woman troubles, which accounts for pretty much all of the daily life here.

More alarmingly, less appropriate and much less welcome music has made its way up the mountains. Just yesterday, I was brutally attacked by the strains of the Crazy Frog. No place is safe now, and it is somehow even more irritating to think that I crossed the Atlantic partly to escape it, only for it to bite me in the arse when I am least expecting it. More surreally, the arrival of electricity today was accompanied by the strains of the MC Hammer classic, You Can’t Touch This. And indeed, you can’t.