My son has good friends who, whilst travelling through the university seeking higher learning, were also enjoying the great outdoors via the generosity of the Australian Army Reserve.

It seems that our friends, the army reservists came across a number of fellow travellers from other countries who were following the same path as the aussies; so naturally some smart ass leg pulling occurred - friendly rivalry.

When one of our friends was based at the army base and going out on bivouac , he saw a couple of american marines sitting around an open fire and decided that it would be a great idea to share some of the local bush lore with them; so with this in mind he set off to find a tree, one with soft bark and wood, close by.

After knocking on the trunk of a couple of trees he found a tree that gave off the particular hollow type sound he was looking for. A sound that led him to believe that his objective of being able to plug in an electic razor and shave could be achieved.

Now since he always carried a shaver that could either be battery operated or plugged into the electrical supply he was able to connect the lead to the shaver and thrust the plug deeply into the trunk and shave to the total amazement of all the onlookers.

When asked how on earth did he manage to do that; he explained that in Australia after a lightening storm some trees carried a small source of electricity for a couple of days, a source that could be tapped into if you only knew how. A local phenomonen. The americans were justifiably amazed and spent the next couple of days tapping the campsite trees trying to extract the latent electicity.

Same fellow is also known to have told other american soldiers about the current Australian problem of the "Jumping Bears".

Seems that these Jumping Bears come upon you when you least expect them, jumping out trees to rip the hair out of your head so that they can build their nests. Particularly bad problem in Spring- which is on the way as I write - woohoo - next week Spring arrives!