I know. I know I know. New blog, new subject matter. And yet – no. I have to get this out of my system. It’s bad every year for spiders, here, and to a certain extent I’m used to it. I think it might be because my house backs onto allotments, which I like to think is a bit like being in the country. But this year – this year takes the cake, and by “cake” I mean “a special cake traditionally baked to mark particularly spidery summers”.
They. Are. Everywhere. Tiny ones in the sink. Small ones hanging from the windowpane. Medium ones scuttling along under the windowsill. Big ones which are sometimes on the ceiling… and sometimes not. Really really really really big ones in my sitting room; in my bathtub; in the middle of the living room floor, and, particularly memorably, ON MY BARE ARM.
And those are just the real ones. I haven’t even started on the imaginary ones. Every scritchy-scritchy-scritch-scratch is a spider waiting to happen. Every time my mother looks at the ceiling I recoil. Every time I look at the ceiling she recoils. The imaginary spiders are even more everywhere than the real ones. The tangle of dog hair by the sofa (because my dog, having stubbornly retained her winter coat all the way through a particularly humid and unpleasant summer, has now, at the end of the summer, decided that it might be a good time to get rid of it); the loose thread on my tracksuit bottoms; the hole in the wainscotting which used to be a telephone point; my shoelaces; the cobweb in the corner; the telephone wire; a particularly bungy patch of carpet; the plum stone that missed the bin; the arms of my glasses. My own hair. I see something moving out of the corner of my eye and leap off the sofa brushing frantically at my arms, only to realise that it was just the reflection of my arm moving in the television screen. I twitch spasmodically in the middle of chatting to someone, only to realise that it’s just my laptop’s power cord slithering over the bed.
I had this tapped, that’s the really annoying thing. Last year and the year before, high on the Friendly Spider Course at London Zoo, I was prowling the house with a martini glass and a Mr Men book looking for gigantic spiders to take out, just to prove that I could. But this year, for some reason, I have completely lost my nerve. I cannot decide whether I should try going back to the Friendly Spider people for a refresher or just demand a refund.
I am starting to feel like a lesser character in a Stephen King novel. The one who gets twenty pages of backstory and snappy dialogue and is just starting to sound as if she might be quite interesting actually when she is MURDERED. By spiders.
It’s less funny than it sounds, to be honest.
