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.