Spiders

I often find it hard to sleep at night and find it a great time for doing those jobs that never get done. In the small hours of a morning I decided to take down the lounge curtains and wash them. They’d been up ages gathering dust because they were bulky and heavy to handle. Why take down curtains at that unearthly hour you may ask. Well for a start I don’t know anyone else foolish enough to be awake then, so my stretching up and down in front of the window grimacing with effort wouldn't be observed.

After 20 or so minutes heaving and cursing I’d almost unhooked the second curtain when I came eye ball to eye ball with a gignormous hairy spider. I’ve nothing against house spiders provided they keep well out of sight and preferably out on my specific house.
I had a very close encounter with a small potentially deadly spider back in the days of my early carefree womanhood in a far off beautiful land called Australia. That particular spider decided it didn’t appreciate blooming young women and bite me, of course I recovered but it left me wary of all eight legged creatures.
This one looked highly intelligent and cunning too, it sat firmly affixed to the curtain flexing it’s spindly hairy legs challenging me to dare try and move it.
The only person in the house apart from me was my teenage daughter blissfully asleep upstairs, I gently woke her whispering promises of financial reward if she’d get up and help, however one look at the seemingly grinning giant insect convinced her no money was worth approaching it. feeling woebegone I asked her to keep her eye on it while I had a cup of tea in the kitchen and tried to come up with an eviction plan. Cruelty to creatures great or small is not something I aspire to, though my children would beg to differ having suffered numerous groundings and denial of privileges over the years. However on this occasion I decided to hoover the blighter off, for a fleeing moment I knew how Margaret Thatcher felt trying to purge the miners, unlike her though I just couldn‘t bring myself to do it. I told my now somewhat bemused daughter to watch the beastie again and retreated back to the kitchen for another cup of tea. Plan B was to get it into a cup and throw it out but back in the lounge daughter had forgotten her duty and was leafing through a mag drooling over a picture of some talentless pop star and the spider was nowhere in sight. Shaking nervously I eased the curtain off and threw it on the floor. “You can fold it up” I told my daughter craftily knowing she’d forgotten the beastie thanks to the talentless twerp.
I watched her carefully as she picked up a corner of the drape and then screamed piercingly “There is is!!“. I didn’t dare go for another cuppa, I thought of calling the fire dept but doubted they’d rescue me. With a lot of effort and sobs on my part we manoeuvred it reluctantly into a plastic cup. The whole eviction process took just over two and a half hours, Davina McColl could have handled it far quicker. I once read spiders prefer to return to the warmth of houses. As I said before, none of my neighbours are ever awake at that hour of the morning. Just as well they would’ve spotted my daughter and I dressed in nighties, wearing ridiculous fluffy slippers trudging up to the top of the street and throwing the spider into someone else’s garden and running away as fast as we could. It was sheer coincidence the garden we threw it in belonged to a misrable neighbour.