I must be getting old.
A sure sign is my new attitude towards spiders. In my youth I'd run screaming from any room inhabited by a tiny, dark eight-legged shadow lurking in a corner, slamming the door behind me and vowing in ever more histrionic terms never to return until Dad dispatched it with a smack and a flush of the loo.
In adolescence, and with my sister's encouragement, I'd climb on to a chair and smother the thing lurking in the cornice by spritzing it with sticky hairspray, wait for it to drop stiffly on to the floor, and then scald it with boiling water.
Now, however, I hear the wise voice of my late mother telling me, as she so often did, that spiders won't do me any harm, that they're a good thing because they eat insects, and that they're an indication that your house is clean.
Instead of killing them, she would simply remove them by covering them with an upturned glass, sliding a piece of paper underneath, and lifting the lot to an open window or door to allow them to escape without harm. She'd do this swiftly without blinking, and I always admired her for it. Strangely enough, soon after she died, out of the corner of my eye I saw a big black spider scuttle across the floor of my living room and felt comforted rather than freaked out. I just let it go where it wanted to go, and never saw it again.
These days, I find myself becoming irritated at other people's hysterical arachnophobia. I'm beyond all that now, I tell myself. Though I could never, ever, do the paper-and-glass thing, I no longer experience that overwhelming fear and panic. I prefer just to give them space in the hope that they'll disappear of their own accord.
Until last week, that is. No sooner had I put down the phone to my other sister after enduring her imaginative description of a series of spiders, each "the size of a sparrow", visiting her home over the last few days, than I too got the fright of my life. There, in the further corner of my bedroom, was the biggest, blackest, hairiest spider I've seen for decades. It was looking at me in a challenging fashion; I recalled one friend saying she had one so big it chased her out of the room.
The hot, dry summer of 2014 has provided spiders with plenty of bugs to eat, thereby giving them a reason to hang around house corners getting fat. They're not going anywhere soon: now it's autumn, they're on the look-out for a mate.
Never has the phrase "aw mammy daddy!" been so apt.
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