Chai on a Bed of Daisies

Sound like a hippy thing? It was an extremely hippy thing. My first morning in Melbourne I went with Wendy and her eldest son Ivan to the market in St. Andrew, one town deeper into the forest than Hurstbridge where they live (which is already deep in the forest at the lonesome end of the long long suburban railway line). And there, nestled in the trees, were crystals and hand-knitted finger puppets, a 16-year old kid with the looks of a latter-day Tom Waits growling the blues to the ploink-ploink of a banjo, girls with daisy-chains in their hair, and us, the hippest of all the hippies in our spiff new t-shirts, sipping chai, and exploring how the tips of your fingers (given the right puppet) can be Bruce Lee, even if the rest of your body is all Bob Dylan.

This is life in subsubsuburban Melbourne.