Dr Brian Wood

Two coincidences with a point 1. I was a squaddie in the army in Cyprus during the Suez crisis (just to put a time frame). The others in the tent knew I was a biologist, and brought me in a chameleon they had found. We kept this as a pet and admired its fly catching technique. Later, I was employed as entomologist on a citrus plantation there, and was interested to develop the natural biological control of the pests, rather than spraying vast amounts of insecticide. A famous "mentor" from University of California came to see what we were doing. I also mentioned the chameleon, which I had never since found one. He said he would like one (he had a licence to import "predators" into USA). Walking through a field with some others, we were trying to explain what they were. "Well, they are like this" said Paul, and picked one off of the tree we were passing. I never saw another in the wild. 2. In Malaysia I ran with an unserious running group called the Hash House Harriers (now world wide) . My first such pack was in a rather rural area around a small town called Kluang. Some runners were from a nearby British Ghurka army camp and some were in the Planting industry (like me). When the army left the Far East, we Plantation men carried on and occasionally complained that the record books seemed to have disappeared (time late 1960s). After coming back to live in Devon, UK, I had occasion to visit a village about 20 miles away to discuss a property business matter with a colonel, at his house there (about 1999, this was). After our discussion, he showed us some rooms and I said I see from ornaments here that you must have been in the Far East. He agreed, and said of course most was in Hong Kong, but some was in a place I'm sure you have never heard of called Kluang. He went on to say that as well as the army there, a main interest had been something which surely I had never heard of, called the Hash House Harriers. It turned out he had been the secretary in the years when I had been running. With the passage of time, we did not recognise each other (and had not been colonel then). Not only that, but he said he had assumed that as the army left, the whole thing would fold up, and he had kept the books. Since I still had some Far East contacts, he gave them to me, and eventually I got them back to the present organisers of the Kluang Hash, which still flourishes.