Old folks on electric bikes are sure getting some very bad press these days. A report just out illustrates the close relationship between seniors, their electric bikes, and the hospital (or even the morgue). They’re reported to be going down like flies.

This does not surprise me at all, as all the seniors I know were born in the 40’s and 50’s and were die-hard rebels. They know they are going to live forever or die trying. They are also greenies when it suits them, on a fixed income, and, considering their pre-death status, have no time to waste.

The dangerous e-bike reports are also a tad irrational. As more e-bikes are being sold, there will of course be more accidents. Logically, as well, the more elderly segment of society is buying them. We already have to deal with bad knees, replaced hips, dodgey backs and reduced lung capacity. Who needs a hill?

One old lady I know (several years my senior) has gleefully been riding a souped-up e-bike since the day they were invented. Several others are constantly looking into the matter of getting their speeds up on flat runs.

From my point of view the problem is not with electronic bikes and seniors it’s with everyone else—especially cars and their attitude of complete entitlement to anything paved.

Youngsters with cool traditional bikes are just plain jealous that they are being passed all the time by casual, un-sweaty, mechanically-enhanced oldies humming Beatles songs. That this geriatric segment of society can neither hear nor see very well and have almost no reflexes left is entirely beside the point.

Car drivers cannot stand them as e-bikes can approach unnervingly quickly from various directions and cannot be completely ignored (like classic bikes can) and are often spotted too late. E-bikes can get up to the speeds of scooters, but are less visible as they have no headlight or big-blobby helmet filling up the rear view mirrors. We are the stealth riders.

Of course accidents can happen. A most embarrassing incident comes to mind from a year ago in Münster—the bike capital of Europe. Stopping at an intersection (on a normal city bike) I applied simultaneously the back-pedal brake and the hand brake. I came to a complete stop and then, gracefully, I like to think, tilted sideways and the line-up of bikers to my right went down like a house of cards.

So, fellow-e-bike riders, soldier on. Be courageous, be swift, be careful, take the back roads, and stay forever young.

I don’t really want to say this, but sometimes life in Geneva can be a bit slow. I mean I, personally, really like watching the hedgehog do her long-legged stroll through the garden in the evenings. And I am thrilled by the redstarts teaching their children to fly. (Henry, the cat, shares both these interests.)  The snails gathered around the newly sprouting dahlias protected by their blue chemical circles are a constant source of suspense and worry; and the neighbour’s bamboo shoots pushing up vigorously through my newly-mowed lawn arouse feelings of vague disquiet.

Despite all this, there are moments when you just need a little more action, and so you cross the border into France.  Now life in the French countryside is not exactly Niagara Falls either. For example, there is no waxworks museum starring Justin Bieber or fire alarms going off in your hotel at the crack of dawn; but there are casinos, outdoor markets, water parks, strikes, and malls.

A Sunday or two back, for example, I awoke to an unfamiliar noise. It wasn’t a bird. It wasn’t a plane. It was a Mothers’ Day Stock Car Race. Taking place on a patch of wasteland down by the Rhône River it buzzed its way through the day. I don’t know if mothers were driving or watching or at home with pillows over their heads, but it was loud and cheerful and a complete anathema to our Swiss Sunday rule that we cannot disturb the neighbours by cutting the grass.

French Sunday morning markets are also completely charming. Shunning the supermarket, and with pockets full of euros one approaches with an open, friendly, giving, attitude. This is rewarded by the Candy Man, the Vegetable Man, the Bread Man, the Roast Chicken Man all awaiting you with open arms.

The Cheese Man is an especial favourite as he saws you off great chunks of ancient Beaufort and brébis and cheerfully philosophises that for a produce that tastes so good, money is entirely irrelevant.

The Fish Man explains how his trout are stocked in a pure mountain stream that comes from a tinkling mountain spring, and the fish swim to his door in the morning happy for their filets to be taken to the market.

The Pirate-Gypsy Provencal Man in his fedora and golden earring behind his mounds of olives and tapernades looks way more wicked than any waxworks Johnny Depp pirate.

Bags full and pockets empty, you start to leave, but are hailed by Swiss-village acquaintances who are refreshing themselves on benches under a shady tree with local wine – the light bubbly sort suitable for breakfast. So you join them for a glass.

You finally make it home—completely satisfied and exhausted with your delicious purchases and all the social excitement.

You prepare a plate of bread, cheese, and paté forestière; pull up a lawn chair: put in your earplugs; and settle in to see what the redstart chicks and the bamboo shoots are up to.

This morning, it seems, Switzerland is at the very centre of things. BBC World Service radio news has featured three Swiss stories: the triumphal inauguration of the Gothard base tunnel (two tubes of 57 km—longest, deepest and best in the world), the lady who walked 900 kilometres to Geneva collecting peace-in-Syria messages, and the Swiss-German village that has voted to pay rather than take in nine refugees.

The tunnel success story I regard as my own personal triumph. My federal taxes over the past 17 years have paid for the technology, the machines, the workers, and even the ribbon-cutting politicians.

So, Europe, you’re welcome! May you put your Gouda cheese on the train in Rotterdam, and send it straight as a non-polluting arrow down to Genoa. There may it be unloaded, and replaced with Parmesan cheese to be sent right back to Holland. This is the Europe that we have come to know and love.

The second story was about a lady called Katherine Davies who has just completed a walk from London to Geneva to tell diplomats at the UN to stop the war in Syria.  To help her in this quest, she has collected messages—both real and electronic—from people she has met along the way to tell the diplomats to stop the war in Syria. She feels that if enough people do this, then the diplomats will stop the war in Syria. She was interviewed, and she feels very optimistic.

I wish her the very best of luck.

So far, so good. However, every belly-button, no matter how well-kept, has a bit of lint at the bottom. And so it was with story number three.

This concerns an unpleasant situation in a small pleasant village called Oberwil-Lieli which is near Zurich.  The unfortunate set of circumstances includes: a right-wing mayor, a homogeneous population (only 10% foreigners), wealth (10% of the inhabitants are millionaires), and a crime-free population of 2,200 people.

Last year the mayor refused to take in a handful of refugees (“Le Village Suisse qui Choque l’Europe”—le Matin 25.09.2015) and a recent village vote has given the no-refugee crowd a very small majority.

The BBC interviewed a reasonable-sounding young woman from the village, and she explained that it was the “old people” who were responsible for the “bad vote” as they didn’t want crime, rape, bedlam, or having non-German speakers about. Taxpayers and individuals are ready to cough up the 290,000 Swiss franc fine instead.

So, Katherine, you’ve come to the right place.  I don’t think you should stop in Geneva (we have lots of refugees and asylum seekers here) but keep on walking over Oberwil-Lieli way. It’s not that far (248 km / 52 hours) and it sure sounds like they need all the help they can get.

I have a hedge. It has a monstrous life of its own filled with birds and cats and caterpillars and cobwebs, and stands fat and strong between my jungle-garden and the race-course road where people travel at top speed towards town in the mornings. The trajet home is even faster as who wants to miss their apero?  They are going so fast that it seems they have never noticed the speed limit which is a clearly-posted, sedate 30 kph through the village.

And now it seems that one of these drivers has complained about my hedge impeding their vitesse while sailing over the speed bumps around the corner. There is also a neighbour who is also a possible suspect. Anyway. I’ve been busted, yet again, by the hedge police.

This time they’ve even sent coloured photos: a set of four. In them the hedge looks quite perky and healthy. In the background, over the road is the ugly house that was built in the nature reserve. Needless to say, they do not have a hedge, so are possibly jealous of mine.

Anyway, we are routinely busted by the hedge police as both height and width of roadside verdure are strictly regulated and seriously enforced. A young city-slicker usually arrives with a clipboard and an attitude. Long conversations with cantonal officials have resulted in civil engineers surveying our property, the hedge, and the road. We keep winning (Geneva has stolen a bit of our land to widen their road) and the hedge keeps growing. Nothing else happens.

One of my summertime jobs in Canada was pruning baby Christmas trees, so I consider myself something of a pro when it comes to pruning. Needless to say, I never get to stand on the ladder or use the electric trimmers except as a special treat. I’m the orange leaf-rake and green compost-bag girl. I push the communal garden refuse container into place. I snip the odd branch with the old-fashioned, dull, wooden-handled shears.

So, I will pay my annual respects to my hedge. I will clip the fragrant wet cedar, spruce, laurel and other hedge-bushes that I don’t know the names of. I will work diligently for an hour or two and fill the compost bin and revel in a feeling of deep satisfaction. I will have a bath in water that will become like the insides of a China tea pot – flecked with green leaves and mysterious brown bits.

I will obey the Geneva Ordinance of the Roads dated April 28, 1967, L1 10, article 70 et al. and will (temporarily) be back in from my walk on the wild side of the law.

If you don’t get bitten by one of the millions of poisonous snakes on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa you will live a long, long life.  Centenarians abound.

This has been attributed to the food: purple sweet potatoes, canola oil, tofu, ginko nuts, vegetables, konbu seaweed, squid and octopus. Fish and Vitamin D from the sunshine also help. Add to this their famous healthy black sugar and a little bit of Okinawa pork belly which is quite good for you.

Jasmin tea, turmeric supplements, and hitami lemon all help tremendously.

Their philosophy for eating stipulates that you do not eat to bursting point, but stop when you feel 80% full. This is called hara hachi-bu. And in Okinawa, there is no word for retirement. You continue working until you stop permanently. The population is not stressed by time, and Okinawans live in a perpetual state of sun-kissed contentment.

But what really keeps you going for a century is the Okinawan salt. It is sea water salt extracted by using a natural temperature instant evaporation technique. It is full of potassium, zinc, iron, copper, and manganese. There’s even a plan for taking the sodium chloride out of it to make it the first super-healthy non-salt salt. It actually lowers the blood pressure, and as the island is unendingly battered by storms the magic sea-salt is in the air at all times. Baby Okinawans absorb its goodness from the day they are born.

Now, living in the Geneva countryside we are going to have to mix and mingle some of these exotic products and techniques into our new improved health regime. It’s a bit like moving the furniture around in the house. I will change my tea to Jasmin and see if the vegetable barn lady has purple potatoes. The fragrant clouds of grilling squid and octopus are bound to surprise and delight my neighbours this summer.

I will go for a troll on the internet to see about procuring black sugar, konbu seaweed and Okinawa health-salt. And I will eat as much tofu and turmeric as I can until some new study shows them to be poisonous.

I really feel that by adding these new health-foods to my daily rigorous regime (a walk for the legs in my rice-paddy shoes, a dose of right-handed pro-biotic yoghurt for the gut, a glass of Geneva red wine for its antioxidants, and lots of black chocolate to fight stress) I might be on the verge of a brand-new new life-changing live-forever epiphany.

In all the excitement, though, I really mustn’t forget to take my pills.