The causes of the recent rise in house prices are multiple and complex. On the one hand it is simply about supply and demand. The number of people seeking houses in certain parts of the UK is greater than the number of houses available. The population of the South-East, for example, continues to grow through immigration, the higher incidence of divorce puts more people on the market and large disposable incomes increase the demand for second homes and buy-to-let properties. 

This problem is compounded by the government’s apparent reluctance to build new properties or to allow private construction. The housing market is characterised by a strong degree of nimbyism – people oppose new buildings in the vicinity of their precious castle – especially, if they might be housing those at the lower end of the social scale. Despite recent announcements of future eco-towns, demand still vastly outstrips supply.

Meanwhile those inside the precious circle of property-ownership rub their hands as prices increase. The most fortunate with a bit of slack on their repayments re-mortgage to secure the credit and debt that drives our economy – investing wisely in fast cars and foreign holidays. As a consequence, any dip in house price growth threatens economic meltdown. Kings and queens in their castles glance nervously at tabloid reports of potential shocks to the system – the Daily Mail’s shock-horror, stock page-fillers. 

Those outside the golden circle, and unable to secure a place in the dwindling rump of social housing, must depend on privately rented properties, whose rents must rise to keep pace with mortgage costs. Generally speaking these rented houses are the second homes of the already bricked-and-mortared – monthly rent payments, paying off their mortgages, widen the disparities between those in and out. Those renting pray for a crash, while those with property live in fear of it – this has become a new divide around which the country is aligned.

As a member of the renting class with a view to buying a place I wonder what might be achieved by some form of class action? If all first-time buyers got together and agreed to abstain from buying for three months, would it be enough to bring the prices down? I am no economist and don’t know what percentage of the market we represent. As a social scientist I could predict that this is not a natural coalition, and it would take a lot of solidarity to resist the temptation to split as prices fell. What do you think?

The axis along which I want to explore contemporary greenness relates to how self-described middle-class greens organise their consumption habits and in particular how they deal with the problem of excess. I am not promising a comprehensive picture here – just another way of cutting up the colour chart, which might prove timely given the recent green turn in UK centrist politics.

There are two ideal types of identity I want to contrast here, which I will term the green aesthete and the green accumulator. For the aesthete the diagnosis of climate change and the widespread recognition that affluent elements of Western society are living beyond their means demands abstinence. For some this is an earthy retreat to the land, to local scales of living, self-sufficiency and recycling – picture Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall without his sports car. For others this abstinence takes a more urbane form – it is about downsizing, investing in durability, bicycling and a near obsessive attention to the provenance and footprint of their purchases. These aesthetes are generally pessimistic about the future; emphasis is placed on treading more slowly and lightly on the earth, on using less for longer.

For green accumulators climate change is an opportunity for accelerated business as usual. Optimistically they believe that economic growth can drive decarbonisation and push us towards sustainability in a post-materialist world. Everything is OK so long as we recycle our Chianti bottles, offset our flights and buy locally. There is nothing wrong with the material quantities in circulation in modern life, only the quality of those stuffs it puts in motion. Lean, mean and efficient, the bright green networked future will be one fresh from the science fiction of hyperbolic cybernetics – think a utopian version of the Matrix.

Aesthetes see accumulators as selfish and greedy ostriches, burying their heads as the landfills grow and the offset forests spread. Accumulators are baffled by the aesthetes and accuse them of being reactionary and of withholding the benefits of growth from those who’ve yet to experience them.

The nub of their differences relate to their faith in the capitalist system and human ingenuity. Aesthetes understand it as a rapacious monster, out of sync with planetary limits. They argue that economic growth is inherently contradictory – hell bent on destroying the very conditions for its own survival; we can not grow our way out of this crises. Accumulators shake their heads. We have been here before, they say. You preached about the ozone hole and food shortages but look how technology helped us out – limits are there to be pushed. They argue that without consumption there can be no market and thus no jobs – we’ll all be unemployed living in mud huts, they chortle.

On both sides tempers are raised and lost, close friends are made and fall out and much ink is spilt.

As the pastel-purple shade of greenness peddled by the New Labour and Smiley Conservatives consensus seeps into the mechanisms of UK public policy and practice it is useful to reflect on what it means to be green now. How does this typology help make sense of recent initiatives?

On the one hand we see vague advocations and demonstrations of abstinence –Cameron momentarily forsakes his car for an eye-catching bicycle, Blair has himself spotted at farmer’s markets and both make much of taking the train. We have discussions of road charging, refuse pricing and domestic energy efficiency (turn off the TV) – all aiming to reduce consumption. We also see numerous market creation initiatives aiming to steer economic growth onto a greener trajectory to assist accumulation – these include subsidies for renewables, public transport and eco-housing. The star of the offset companies is ascendant and commodified carbon is making some people rich – a form of accumulation through absolution.

Both the government and the opposition appear confused, caught out by the public’s green enthusiasms – both are dedicated to maintaining accumulation but are continually reminded of the real and present obstacles posed by the carbon challenge. As they peddle their consensus and scrabble about to justify a nuclear expansion it might be useful to remember the virtues and possibilities of abstinence? Where would this leave us on the colour chart? Deepening the green from pastel purple-green we get deep purple green – a sort of aubergine bruise green. Don’t expect to see that in the manifesto branding.

For the last thirty years or so, Earthwatch have been pioneering a particular model of scientific research. Scientists working in the field in exotic far flung places or concentrating on charismatic species approach (or are approached) by the organisation offering opportunities for fee-paying ‘volunteers’ to fly out and join their programmes. Their clients get involved in the research process, they get to witness science in action, get close to wild places and animals and have a novel travel experience. This model of scientific ecotourism has been very successful. Earthwatch now sponsor nearly 150 projects, some of which have been running for several decades and they have provided useful data on threatened species. Many volunteers come back and make these trips their annual holidays.

With the recent ‘climate turn’ in the ethical preoccupations of wealthy Western liberals, Earthwatch have sought to develop a range of climate change research holidays. If ‘biodiversity’ was the ethical watchword of the greens in the nineties, climate change and carbon are fast becoming the must-know, must-care-abouts of the ethically conscious. These projects have proved very successful and many are booked out until the end of next year.

In one example volunteers fly to the edge of the Arctic for 11 days to help scientists gather data on changes in vegetation in one of ecosystems most threatened by global warming. This will set you back nearly £2500, but would surely be an epic and worthwhile adventure? Undoubtedly it would bring you close to the sublime – walking out at dawn across the ice sheets – but how much will it really help understand and tackle climate change?

During a long-haul return flight to Anchorage, the jumping off point for Alaska, the well meaning volunteer would emit 2.1 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent at high altitude – that is a lot of carbon; in fact it is almost exactly the total amount we should be emitting in a year, according to research into the personal carbon quotas we would all need to avoid global warming. A keen conservationist would have to use up their allowance for just over a week’s science. While the research is no doubt important, and might not take place without the ‘volunteer contribution’, there are surely greener ways of doing it?

Earthwatch make it mandatory to offset this carbon – through their Oxford-based partner Climate Care. This fast growing company charge just over fifteen pounds to dispose of this amount of hot air. On the surface this process of exchange might appeal – we can have our carbon and burn it – but the CO₂ is still up there in the atmosphere, perpetuating and exacerbating the problem they set out to save. This is difficult issue for overseas research and tourism more generally, but it is one most starkly expressed when cause and effect clash so clearly.

Note: The ethics of offsets are fascinating and murky – see this excellent spoof site, which maps the logic of carbon onto offsetting relationship infidelities.

Complex computer models lie at the heart of flood risk mapping in the UK. They are central to efforts to predict future inundations, to decisions on where to site defences and, perhaps most controversially, as to whether or not your house is eligible for insurance. There are a number of different models on the market, which have been developed by academics and consultants and there is a fair degree of competition between them.

In an extended series of sessions, Stuart Lane – the hydrologist on the team – introduced us social scientists to the mathematics of hydrological modelling. We learnt how to turn fluxes of water into equations, comprising Greek symbols and other elegant hieroglyphics. We worked our way through Newton’s laws and were regaled with the specific material properties of H₂O. Standing on the shoulders of past hydrological heroes (and heroines) we formulated differential equations that claimed to simulate the conservation of mass and momentum, that accounted for turbulence in a body of water and acknowledged the effects of the roughness of a river’s channel.

Water appears to be a fundamentally complex material that has different dynamics over three dimensions and through a variety of spatial and temporal scales. The secret to modelling is to simplify this complexity. The model we used reduced three dimensions to one and lumped the range of variables that effect the roughness of a channel into the ‘Manning’s coefficient’ – a constant devised by an Irish water engineer at the end of the nineteenth century.    

It is useful to understand models as conceptual representations of reality. The Greek and hieroglyphics can be understood as an hypothesis of how the landscape works – like a photograph or painting, they depict the modeller’s view of the form and dynamics of a place. However, unlike a painting, the representations they embody can be tested empirically. To test a model you need to compare its predictions against data gathered from the field on river form and dynamics and past flood events. If the data match what is predicted then you can have some confidence in the model, if not then you need to re-examine your equations.

In practice the standards for verification are messy and contested. Modelling emerges more as a process of tinkering, or moving back and forth between data and representation, cobbling together equations and varying constants to reach a likeness. I pictured a scene from a hair-brained Heath Robinson drawing, where the pre-War car-boot sale miscellanea he favoured has been replaced with other people’s χ’s, γ’s and λ’s. In place of the elegant continental heuristics of French hydrological theorists, we have the can-do fudging of British engineering. Equifinality – or the existence of mutually incommensurable solutions to models – is a common phenomenon and its resolution draws on tacit experience not easily formulated into equations.

Having flown through the theory we shifted to the computer and had our first encounter with a software encoding of what we had just covered. A consultant from a modelling company introduced as to HEC-RAS – a free hydrological model that has been developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers. For those of us familiar with Windows it had a fairly intuitive interface and we soon had the water flowing and we worked our way through two exercises. The first of which was to calibrate the model encoded in the software with some real data. This involved shifting constants to try and match the model to what had been observed – we tweaked and tinkered until the lines of our graphs converged.

The second exercise was more satisfying and involved simulating different interventions to try and prevent a bridge overcharging on a fictional Beaver Creek in Oregon. Bridge overcharging occurs when water from a flooding river builds up behind a structure until it breaks over the top. This is dangerous and often causes structural damage. The options on the front page of the software guided us towards some hard engineering solutions and we were soon digging ponds, building embankments and creating offline storage space for excess water upstream of the bridge. I dug a giant pond on the floodplain and running simulations I could follow a surge of water down valley and identify whether or not the bridge was saved. This provided a fairly graphic visualisation – no one ran for the hills and no arks were built – but you got a sense of the strength and visceral surging of a flood. The model was clearly a powerful tool that could give planners a great deal of confidence in planning building, land management and interventions.

This exposure to modelling was a thought-provoking experience and there were a number of issues that struck me. The first, and perhaps most uplifting of these was to understand the esoteric language of hydrological equations not as the exclusive code of an elite group of experts but as a finely developed expression of a whole new way of seeing and thinking about landscapes. In some ways we can understand this ‘thinking like a river’ in Greek and hieroglyphics as an expression of a deep-seated and sincere ethical sensibility. This sensibility is grounded in a well-honed sense of curiosity and a desire to witness and convey the complex dynamics of nonhuman processes. It represents the apotheosis of a way of learning to be affected by a landscape and of tuning into to its ebbs and flows.     

The second issue which stuck me related to the separation I felt at the computer from the real landscape I was supposed to be modelling and altering. Playing god from an aerial viewpoint I felt enormous power and irresponsibility while digging lakes, flooding farmland and inevitably altering people’s lives. The software successfully enabled the God-trick of mapping, which divorces the observer from the lived reality of the places and peoples they are overseeing. Equipped with this device a modeler could have enormous power to change the risks and opportunities provided by a landscape, not to mention its form and habitability for things other than humans.

In some ways such encoded models can be understood as what the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour has termed black boxes – technologies whose internal logics are effaced once they have been constructed – which have real material effects on the worlds they are applied to. Stuart was refreshingly open, humble and uncertain about the models he introduced us to. He provided a rare and generous insight into these black boxes and in shedding light on their internal operations and practical operation he opened a valuable interdisciplinary space for new and more democratic ways of engaging with flood risk modeling. From here we aim to follow models and modelling in practice to find ways of opening them out to those they affect.

Humanitarian travel has a long history. Monks like Saint Columba, who founded the religious community on Iona, travelled long distances to bring their faith and compassion to other countries. In latter years colonial missionaries set out for Africa to minister to the people, brining schools and hospitals (as well as infectious diseases) to far flung places. Such trips were hard, uncomfortable and often dangerous. While it would be foolish to describe them as tourists, they were undoubtedly affected by the allure of distance and far away places.

This humanitarian imperative for far away travel appears to be in good health in the 21^st century. Missionaries are still active and increasing numbers of secular volunteers and highly trained and often poorly-paid aid workers set off each year to try and help relieve those affected by warfare, drought, disease and natural disasters. In spite of the dubious consequences of many of their interventions, it is difficult to fault their commitment.

However, the recent expansion, cheapening and democratisation of air travel has spawned a new mode of encountering the impoverished other. Over the last ten years it has become fashionable and even necessary for future career development to undertake a short period of volunteering in the developed world. Middle class students fresh out of school or university take ‘gap years’ to teach English, help orphans, build houses or care for charismatic animals. Generally speaking these adventures take the form of six months in a poor but politically stable, formally colonised country in the developing world. Travellers work for a bit on an organised project and then take time to backpack around their host country.

This boom in extended trips has in part been driven by the marketing activities of a growing number of UK-based organisations who put volunteers in touch with local humanitarian holiday providing organisations, many of whom have spring up to service this demand and gain most of their revenue from volunteers. In exchange for considerable fees (c. £1500 a month) volunteers are reassured of their safety, they gain confidence in worthiness of the project and they guarantee that they will carry out their work with like-minded individuals.

Looking through the marketing materials for these trips the key phrase the keeps emerging is ‘making a difference’ – you to can make a difference in six months or less to a particular needy group. Your skills are required, they need you and you can have fun helping them. Having witnessed some of these projects firsthand in Southern Africa and Sri Lanka I am less certain. While there can be little doubt that most of these volunteers have fun and generally returned home as more rounded and mature citizens, it is not often clear what kind of difference they make. At best they bring some money into poor local economies and enable cosmopolitan cultural encounters. At worst, they undermine local economies, put money into the hands of nefarious local elites and unrealistically raise expectations. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

A starker and more alarming expression of this trend has recently emerged in the form of ‘humanitarian tours’. These are short breaks to poor countries, generally lasting between one and three weeks. Here the tourist mixes a few days volunteering on local projects with days on the beach and trips to sights of interest. This appears to be a peculiar way of providing an ethical gloss for the guilt felt by some when travelling to poor countries. I can not imagine this voyeurism achieves anything substantial for the local recipients – indeed if it achieved its stated objects it would destroy the very thing it is selling. Instead, like carbon offsetting, it commodifies the possibilities for atonement without addressing the roots of the problem.

The science of hydrology lies at the heart of the politics and practices of flood risk modelling. It is a mature science dedicated to understanding the movement of water around the entire hydrological cycle. We social scientists were given an intensive crash course on the various components of this cycle by Stuart Lane, a passionate hydrologist with the rare skill of being able to communicate complex concepts to an inexpert audience.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Stuart’s intro gave me a whole new way of looking at the landscape and tuning into its dynamics. Standing beside the River Arun in West Sussex, he brought the river and its catchment to life. He framed the system as an interwoven set of fluid fluxes obeying their own spatial and temporal rhythms. Pulses of rain falling upstream are conveyed down towards the sea, drawn by the force of gravity. On their way down their passage is attenuated – or held up – to varying degrees by the material landscape. Pulses from different tributaries meet and combine into a complex melody of fluid flows.

Back in the seminar room we learnt about the politics of hydrology and the disputes and controversies it both engenders and is called to resolve. In the ancient and intensively worked landscapes that characterise much of the UK, few rain drops pass to the sea without encountering some form of human intervention. People have been managing rivers for millennia – as sources of food and water; for navigation, drainage and irrigation; and, most importantly in the case of this project, to avoid flooding. The river systems in which most of us dwell are now intensively managed to apportion and costs and benefits of riverside living.

In these hybrid landscapes, hydrologists have replaced ancient sages and water diviners as the designated providers of the knowledge required to conduct the passage of water. They have developed sophisticated theoretical and numerical models of hydrological dynamics, which have made them central to the politics and economics of land management – there is both money and power in water if you know what it is going to do.

Generally speaking flooding is a natural process. Many of the areas we currently expect to live dry in would normally spend some time of the year under water if it weren’t for different human interventions. These come at a range of scales – from the drains that convert marsh into habitable land to the concrete levees and barriers that stop rivers from following their normal drift across and out over their flood plains. In different ways these technologies accelerate the conveyance of water through areas at risk and, in so doing, channel problems downstream.

Set against this hard engineering approach there is alternative paradigm of flood management practice growing that seeks to make space for water, designing ‘spongy’ landscapes with space to attenuate excess flows. Unpopulated and marginal areas can be set-aside to receive surges of water, providing storage that accommodates water that would otherwise flood downstream. This is still a marginal approach but it is one that is receiving increasing attention from various circles – including those interested in re-wilding landscapes, as well as those desiring more difficult and inventive engineering challenges.

In short, the politics of managing flooding lies in deciding how the rhythms of water should be conducted through a landscape. In an unregulated system those people with resources upstream could both retain and reject water as they desire, shifting whatever is excess down the valley. Those with money and land downstream can then barricade themselves in with concrete and steel funnels, passing the buck further on to those areas less able defend themselves.

Fortunately, we live in social democracy whose political ecology is less brutal. Instead, there exists a complex political assemblage of different interest groups jostling for their respective interests. Farmers argue for both better drainage and for the security of their most fertile land on the flood plain. Meanwhile, urban dwellers wish to keep their kitchens dry and to ensure their house can be insured. Debates over what to protect thrash out relative risk and the value of different areas and assets.

The problem for hydrologists is that the systems they study, model and try and predict are incredibly complex – they incorporate the intersecting dynamics of vegetation, weather patterns, agriculture and tides, to name but a few. These are processes that are very difficult to tune into and measure. Data is often scant, at the wrong scale or surrogate. If you speak to hydrologists in the lab or field they are full of uncertainty and are modest about what they know and can predict. However, the needs of policy-makers, businesses and pressure groups force them to produce definite knowledge. In their published accounts, much of their uncertainty is erased, buried behind confidence intervals and paramaterisation.

The project that I am part of is seeking to rescue this uncertainty and thus to open up the practices of hydrology, and in particular hydrological modelling to tease out the conditions under which knowledge is produced and decisions are made. It aims to explore different ways of witnessing the forms of environmental expertise that circulate in affected communities. It takes both the creativity and the uncertainty of hydrology to explore a different from of environmental politics.

Once you fix a date to leave a place it gets easier to enjoy living there. The anticipation of returning home increases the intensity of everyday experiences and hassles become easier to bear when you realise that they won’t be there in a month’s time. Furthermore, my memory seems to quickly airbrush out the grimmer moments – like improbably sunny recollections of Scottish summers, Sri Lanka at a distance is swiftly morphing into a paradise. Before this rose-tinting happens I thought it might be interesting to jot down my feelings and observations from the first few days back home.     

The first and most obvious thing that struck me coming off the plane was the change in climate. When we left Colombo it was a humid 38^o; I was sweating sitting still. You’d get out of a cold shower dry off and be wet again before you could get your clothes on. Apparently, conception rates tail off significantly during April and obstetricians get a lull until nine months after the rains have come. At such an extreme torpor sets in – you cower inside hiding from the cosmic laser gun, and the brain slows down as if your synapses have melted or congealed. Clothes are worn only for decency and protection – any insulation is unpleasant.

Back here in early April spring is in the air, the days are lengthening and the optimistic Brits are already barbequing and wearing shorts. However, there is still a chill around that cuts through my inappropriate clothing. I have started to feel my bones again, in a way that doesn’t happen when everything is at body temperature. It is a vague rheumatic ache in the knees that conjures images of threadbare carpets, inadequate radiators and cat-flap draughts. Lying in bed there is a stark temperature difference between my core and periphery – my nose and toes are cold to touch. Clothes become a cocoon – a cosy shell within which to shelter and a line of defence against the elements – I shiver at the very thought of wearing a sarong. For me it is a pleasant change; a return to familiarity where my overworked sweat glands can take a well earned break. I miss the less extreme heat of Kandy and the mood it engendered but it is good to have more control over my thermostat – it is always easier to heat up than it is to cool off. 

The higher temperatures of the tropics accelerate the processes of growth and decay and the air was rich with the smells of fetid sewage, decaying waste and over ripe fruit. Even after six months I was struck by the density and diversity of buzzing, creeping, swooping and microscopic life; stuff feels alive and mobile with an excess of living. This sense of vibrancy is compounded by the noise, bustle and fumes of Sri Lankan cities. Drag-racer buses with belching exhausts and oil tanker horns terrorise pavement-less roads as you jostle with countless dogs, pedestrians, bicycles and buffaloes to make headway. I strove to dull my senses to filter out the onslaught.

In contrast, the land-, smell- and sound-scapes of the UK are more subtle. With winter still ascendant invertebrate life is not yet stirring, migratory birds have yet to return and feral pigeons, dogs and cats cower for warmth. Inured to the extremes of smog in Sri Lanka, the air of Oxford and London is almost fragrant with its bouquet of catalytically converted fumes. In Sri Lanka I breathed through my nose with trepidation, wary of encountering a stench and always ready to switch to my larynx at the first hint of rotting offal. Back here I inhale vigorously, confident in the likely intensity and offensiveness of aromas – I have yet to be struck by a powerful pong, or the sort of smell that moves you to a memory or a déjà vu. The immediacies of urban street life are also much more pleasant. Until moving to Sri Lanka I took pavements for granted and thought little about how accessible and public they make the city. Outside of Colombo, paved space beside roads is almost nonexistent and there is no where to wander and observe – the Sri Lankan flaneur is a hardy specimen.  

Visiting my sister in Camden starkly illustrated the seeming homogeneity of Sri Lankan style. Back in the land of tattoos, piercings, hair dye and myriad accessories it is great not to be stared at and cast in a racial stereotype. The anonymity of difference heralds the return of private space in public areas but it also has its downsides. Gone are the ready smiles and flashing teeth that surrounded us in Kandy – where questioning was persistent and repetitive but it was always courteous. In the metropolis the faces on the street wear wary scowls or give blank stares – up close on the Tube eyes pass through and past you and the comfort of strangers is tinged with a vague sense of loneliness. Like a man from the countryside I find myself smiling at people and engaging with service staff.

I write this on a train speeding up the East coast mainline to Scotland. We are flying through the Fens in smooth clean bubble of ergonomic furniture and wipe clean plastic; everything smacks of order and efficiency. I know we are supposed to have the worst train service in Europe but this feels hyper-modern in contrast to the antiquated railways of Sri Lanka. There you could hang your legs out the door, eat the fiery chick peas and pineapples thrust through the window and smell the landscape as it rattled past. In contrast he we are severed from place and thrust forward to be delivered, pampered and relaxed on time at our destination. Picture windows and elevated lines frame the landscape, while air conditioning erases the cold and the changing air chemistry. 

In a previous entry I wrote about the fluidity of Sri Lankan time and the open-ended nature of schedules and plans. The contrast is clear on this train – the nasal tanoy voice is currently apologising for a four minute delay and several fellow passengers tut and sigh. Four minutes in Sri Lanka is essentially the same moment in a culture of time that works in days, punctuated by lunch and tea. I have certainly found myself more relaxed when the Tube stops in the tunnel or when I get waylaid in meeting an appointment. I doubt this will last but my watch is broken and as it is being fixed I am giving myself a gradual run back in to minute accounting, diarising and getting stressed.

Overall it is good to be back. I left with the option of returning later in the year and thus my departure lacked the finality it might otherwise have engendered. It would be great to return with my experience behind me and in six months we just scratched the surface; I still feel there is much to see and a lot more to make sense of.

Shortly after settling into the geography department at Peradeniya I went to visit the map room. This contains a complete edition of the 1 inch: 1 mile collection produced by the Ceylon Survey Office in the 1950’s – still perhaps the most comprehensive maps to be found of this country. I borrowed the sheets covering the tea country and after poring over them for a couple of hours located Troup Estate up in the hills near Talawakale.

Gilbert Cooper lies four generations back up my tortuous family tree. I won’t bore you with the genealogical connection, but he came to Ceylon in the 1840s at the height of the empire hoping to make his fortune as a planter. Using domesticated elephants he cleared a patch of jungle in hills and planted coffee. Coffee never really took off in Ceylon and his crop has soon wiped out by a pest. He returned to England a broken man. Having gathered some more capital he soon returned to the plantation, replacing the diseased coffee plants with tea bushes.

Tea proved much more suited to the climate and, safely protected by British trade controls, his crop flourished. He established the Troup estate and built a large tea factory and a classic tea bungalow with manicured lawns, flower beds and a very British pond. With his wife he lived the hard and adventurous life of a colonial planter. Their nearest neighbours lived several miles away down bone-rattling roads. Trips to school, to the shops and or to ‘the club’ involved lengthy journeys and a great deal of time was spent at home with the gin.

My great aunt Lorna has born in Ceylon in the 1920’s and grew up here on Troup estate. She met my great uncle Hamish (my grandfather’s brother) before the war and they lived up in the tea country until shortly after independence. My Dad’s first cousin Rob was born here and fondly remembers his childhood years, though this was a turbulent period. Apparently there was a fair amount of agitation on the estates and on one occasion their bungalow was set on fire by a disgruntled employee. Things came to a head in the late 1950’s shortly after independence when Mrs Bandaranaike’s government nationalised the tea estates. Hamish and his family returned to Scotland.

Armed with our map and in the able company of Sanath our driver and his ageing Japanese sports car, Magali and I set off to find Troup estate late last year. We wound our way out of Kandy, swiftly ascending above the tea line and into a landscape of big rounded hills carpeted in spectacular green. We passed gushing waterfalls and dramatic landslides while the gently cooling air grew rich with the smell of cinnamon, cloves and lemon grass – and the inevitable diesel fumes from the old lorries struggling at high altitude.

Eventually we pulled into Talawakele and after making some enquiries were soon grinding our way higher into the hills. Wizened old tea pluckers stood aghast as the old sky blue speed machine swooped by and children stopped their never-ending cricket games to point and run. We soon arrived at a rusty gate and a rusty guard came out of his hut and let us in. We had found it. Troup estate still exists and appears to be in good health. The signs were freshly painted, the bushes were neat and the roads were relatively well maintained. We drew up at the factory – an enormous building out of proportion to the modest constructions around and after a few misunderstandings we were introduced to Arun the manager. Arun was a charming man in his mid-40’s who was fascinated to hear my connection. He quickly handed us over to Chaminda the factory manager for a tour, and instructed him to deliver us to his bungalow for the obligatory cuppa once we were done.

We were led around the factory like visiting dignitaries and traced the processes tea goes through to get from tip to bag. Chaminda explained that these were little changed from Gilbert Cooper’s day. In fact the four-storey factory was still the original building. We tasted a number of types and learnt to differentiate between the famous Orange Pekoe and the dust that goes into your average tea bag. Already high on tannin we made our way down to the bungalow. 

Arun met us with more tea and some super-sweet biscuits and listened patiently as I tried to explain my connection. Unfortunately all of the Troup records appear to have been lost in a fire shortly after the post-independence handover and he had no knowledge of the estate’s history. He explained that Troup is now one of a number owned by a big business conglomerate – that also operates a chain of supermarkets in Sri Lanka. He was just the manager and had only lived on site for a year.

It was slightly disappointing not to find a more tangible connection – a portrait or some hunting trophies – but it was still fascinating to see the place for real and to get a sense of its splendour, its isolation and the deeply iniquitous character of the tea industry. The political economy of tea is little changed since colonial days and a large number of Tamil workers still live on the breadline in basic accommodation with little chance of alternative employment. In many ways it appears that an expatriate upper class was swiftly replaced by an indigenous upper class. The charming Arun regaled us with stories of cricket, his public school and high living in Colombo. 

We were soon on our way again bearing a generous parcel of Troup tea and a new awareness of the longevity and spatial extent of colonial connections.

This story has an interesting further chapter…

Last week my friend Seela, who is a lecturer in the department, asked me to come along to her class on colonial geography and tell her first year students a little about these connections. This was an interesting opportunity. I told my story and then tried to set it in the context of the continued fascination of Sri Lanka to British visitors like myself and the ongoing interconnections between the two countries. Labouring to put my ideas in simple English for the Sinhala medium class, I thumped my chest and presented myself and my current work as distinctly ‘post-colonial’. 

At the end one bright girl asked me if I felt guilty for my past. I tried to explain the shift that has occurred in the UK since the end of empire, as the popular sense of British history is now tinged with remorse and regret and many people feel a need to make form of reparation. However, as Seela and I discussed the issue amongst the students it became clear that many felt little had changed, they were still governed from afar by an Anglicised elite working within the constraints of the Western international development industry. We talked instead about neo-colonialism and the differing commercial and religious imperatives of those governments and organisations that now come to invest time and money in Sri Lanka.

This was a fascinating experience for me and hopefully for the students. It gave some substance to the vague sense of unease I have felt out here when interacting with fellow academics, environmentalists and policy-makers. They are not quite sure why I am here, what power is vested in me and where my research will end up. While I am hoping to set the present in its historical context it is difficult to extricate myself from my own colonial history.

Although the central highlands of Sri Lanka rise to over 2500 metres, there are few distinct peaks. The one exception to this is Adams Peak, which rises like a mini-Matterhorn out of the surrounding tree-clad slopes. You can drive pretty close to the summit but it is still a steep climb to the top. The peak has been a site of pilgrimage for over a thousand years and there is now a well maintained set of over 4500 steps that take you to the top.

The climb is traditionally done in the dark to allow the pilgrim to witness the sunrise from the peak and to return again before the heat of the day. The path is well-lit by ugly strip lights which ascend in the darkness blending confusingly with the stars, so at times it looks like the path goes on for ever up into the heavens. In fact climbing in the dark is best as you can’t see how much further you have to go. 

We set off at 2.30am at a brisk pace and were soon sweating and panting as the path climbed relentlessly upwards. We passed several hundred people on the way up in varying degrees of physical fitness. Some of the more frail looked like they had been climbing for days and it was moving to see hunched women in their 70’s in flip-flops being assisted by several generations of their family.

Feeling macho we went up at a brisk pace and were soon cursing the conservative estimates of our guide book, which suggested leaving four hours for the climb. Drawing near the top with an hour or so to spare it looked like we were in for a long cold wait. Fortunately, the stairs pass by assorted tea shops to refresh the weary and we stopped in for a break. The fodder on sale here is even more unhealthy than at your wayside Little Chef. The tea comes at sugar saturation point and large sugar crystals are on sale to fire up the hypoglycaemic. 

We passed on the sugar lumps and spooned down the tea while staring down over the moonlit landscape – big reservoirs shimmered in the distance while the neighbouring hills stood out gaunt against the gradually lightning sky. As the sun began to make its appearance we climbed the last few steps and elbowed our way amongst the fervent crowd to get a view over the parapet. The sunrise was a bit of an anti-climax but the real highlight was to be seen on the other side of the hill where the peak casts a vivid triangular shadow onto the surrounding clouds.  

The descent was much worse than the climb. The temperature rose quickly and our knees were soon groaning. We soon realised the least painful way down was to run and we bounded our way past groups of bamboozled Sri Lankans. As is their wont, several groups of boys soon joined us and by the time we drew near the bottom we had gathered quite an entourage. I fear several exhausted old ladies might have been bowled over by their enthusiasms. It took several days for our legs to recover but this pain was well earned and richly rewarded.