If you tell people you are going on holiday to Jamaica, they all exclaim that they are wildly jealous. When you tell them that you're going to live in Jamaica, the typical response is rather different. Live? In Jamaica? You must be out of your mind.
For such a small country, Jamaica has managed to acquire a big reputation. Its reputation is so big, in fact, that it divides into two categories. The first of these concerns the tourist hotspots of Montego Bay, Negril and Ocho Rios, and accounts for the fact that many tourists these days opt to stay in a "Superclub" all-inclusive resort.
If the tourists' Jamaica is known for hustlers, the rest of the island has earned an international name for violent crime.
But there is a small fishing village on the south coast that is said to exist outside these two Jamaicas of murderers and hustlers, and I hope that is right, because this is where we have come to live.
Treasure Beach is a sleepy scatter of houses lying along the southern shore of St Elizabeth, the parish known as the island's bread basket because of its farming . Brightly-painted boats putter in and out of the bay all day and night, bringing catches of lobster and kingfish, which the fishermen sell along the beach. There are one or two shacks selling beer on the sand and a handful of rum shacks along the lanes where the fishermen gather in the evening to play dominoes.
An old woman on a donkey rides down from the mountains most days to sell vegetables, and on Sundays the lanes are busy with villagers in fine suits and hats and dresses, making their way to church. The preacher is heavily amplified, and passionately abusive. "You are an abomination!" is his favourite line, and he can be heard repeating it over and again from several fields away. This traditional style of preaching is hugely popular here, and tapes of particularly insulting sermons are on sale in the local town.
It is said that Scottish sailors were shipwrecked on Treasure Beach hundreds of years ago, and this would account for the remarkable colouring of people: the local complexion is a kind of dark caramel fudge, and you see locals with red hair and freckles or blonde hair and blue eyes. There is not a great deal of coming or going here, and almost everybody is related in some way or another to everybody else.
The static nature of this remote community, combined with a tradition for Jamaican men to have maybe 10 or 20 children each, has succeeded in making it quite rare for you to meet anyone who isn't the cousin of the last person you met.
At the heart of Treasure Beach is a smattering of picturesque cottages that make up Jake's Place, an eccentric little hotel described by Vogue as "The chicest shack in the Caribbean." Jake's attracts a collection of backpackers and celebrities: Robbie Williams shot a video here last year and Lennox Lewis is a regular, but these unlikely facts have made pleasingly little impression on the locals, who pay little attention to the trickle of tourists passing through.
The foreigners who come here say much the same thing - that they are drawn by the charms of this tiny and beautiful oasis of "real Jamaica" - and my reasons for moving here are no different: authenticity - "da real ting" - is the fetish of the latterday traveller. But we flatter ourselves. With its magical peace and almost mystical beauty, Treasure Beach is of course a wholly unreal Jamaica.
