On my morning constitutional to get the paper, there was one of those bus-wagon thingies that hippies drive around in, parked bold as brass and half as valuable, by the Minjup station.
Lots of bright colours and an old iron bathtub hanging off the back.
Looked like the tinkers' carts we used to see as kids.
You know how they sometimes have a ridiculously large curved plate between the top of the cab and the "house" bit behind?
Is this in some vain attempt to imitate a spoiler?
Whatever it's called or what it's for, it was painted in green and white with a distinctive red dragon.
This-ish:
As if this were not sufficient of a giveaway, the word CYMRU was painted above it in large gold lettering.
I felt like going over to inquire, perhaps even to welcome the inhabitant souls to the obvious benefits of Minjup by comparison with their place of origin.
The benefits I have in mind include the fact that, last time I was in those environs, many years ago, on a cycling holiday, every Sunday there was like a Good Friday here.
But the sweet small diplomatic voice of calm in my head (a rare visitor to those parts) persuaded me to pass by unspeaking.
I mean: Welsh hippie tinkers in Minjup?
At least multiculturalism is alive and well, if only in our nether lands.

[[Note to self: need a segue here -- "Welsh birds I have known" perhaps?]]

A new lot of birds in the garden today, big mob of the little things that I couldn't recognise at first.
They looked like baby Singing Honeyeaters (Lichenostomus virescens) but there was no sign of the adults; and that would be a rare thing -- and none of the distinctive colouring of this quite common bird.
I'd seen them once before in a garden in the city -- amazingly not far from the CBD -- and couldn't recognise them then.
After a call to my friendly pro ornithologist, they turned out to be Lichmera indistincta, the Brown Honeyeater:

Indistinct maybe as an individual, but totally fascinating as a flock: acrobatic, able to bend themselves in half -- while upside-down -- to get to the little red flowers on the bush outside my window.
Then they'd flutter for a split second into the bird bath for a wash.

This sort of thing makes Minjup worthwhile
On a cold about-to-be-spring-soon day

(The birds, I mean, not the Welsh tinkers.)

Dylan