The Hedge Cops

Now we all know that I love living in Switzerland and can’t think of anywhere I would rather be – a great deal of it due to the orderliness of life: trains run (and it’s a scandal if one is 5 minutes late); planes take off and land rather routinely (occasionally one has to be deviated to Lyon, France about two hours away if there is a blizzard or something, but mainly it all works); our public transportation system works well (in spite of the propensity of people living in Geneva saying and thinking that it doesn’t: I mean I live out of town and during the main traffic hours have a bus every few minutes and there is never a time when there isn’t at least one an hour – we even have night busses on the weekends); our road system is not only great, but kept up-to-date (and improved – many bits of the main arteries are being laid with a phono-absorbant cover; our medical system is one of the best, even if we are want to complain about the high rates of insurance; our telephones, internet and the like function (unless there’s a major “incident” such as the gas main that caught on fire and totally scorched all the wires in the area) and even if something drastic goes wrong it is quickly fixed.

 

Strikes are a rarity – in short life is pretty good.

But that same orderliness has its downside: i.e. the “hedge” cops. Mind you up until now I had never even seen one inspecting trees and hedges until the other day. However, then a very official and in uniform municipal cop wrote me a notice that my hedge needed to be trimmed as it was encroaching on the sidewalk. If I chose not to remedy this horrible oversight they would have it trimmed at my cost!

Mind you I had been working on it with my small cordless hedge trimmer, but due to the heat had left off for a while. I was back at it the past two mornings and have cleared 13 of the 18 patches in between posts. I will meet the deadline of July 31^st.

It really does overlap a lot, doesn't it?

At this point the sidewalk is about a meter wide and even large baby carriages can get by!

"Official" including a stamp at the bottom