High life | 21 July 2016

From my bedroom window I can see a little girl with blonde pigtails riding her bicycle round and round for hours on end. She’s German, looks ten years old and lives nearby. Next month I am finally moving to my new home, a beauty built from scratch amid farmland. Cows, deer, the odd donkey graze nearby, a far better bunch than the one Gstaad attracts nowadays. I am, however, king of the mountain. My place is the highest chalet on the Wispille, one of the three mountains that dominate the Mecca of the nouveaux-riche and the wannabee. Life is swell, as long as the old ticker keeps ticking. An approaching birthday tells me that it’s time to take stock, do something of consequence, begin taking life seriously at last. So I go back to watching this pretty and innocent child riding her bike. She makes it look like 1930, when such children rode bikes around Europe and played games with their own kind and there were no commissars around to teach them political correctness.