A man in my position should not be scared of spiders. But there it is, except to say that while, on occasion, I might leap into the air and scream, my default position is more like wariness.
Spiders work on my imagination. I see one in my bedroom, and fear it will crawl into my mouth when I’m sleeping. Or maybe it’ll bite me on the heid and I’ll die, as you sometimes read about in the public prints. Maybe it’ll hog the duvet, and I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with my legs sticking oot.
I witter in the wake of an incident where, just about to dowse the bedside lamp and switch my head off, I spied a spider on the nearby chest of drawers. It was just sitting there, hatching evil plans.
True, it was not large, but it looked fond of scuttling, as many of them are. Bravely, I went to fetch the jar and piece of paper with which I trap the beasts before letting them go in the back garden, standing at the lit-up doorway in my pants like a pillock.
I always dread that someone out late up the road is going to see me and shout: “Hello, Rab!”
On the way to fetch the doings, I cursed myself for being such a creature of habit and recalled that, some time ago, I’d bought a spider-catching gizmo off yon Amazon. It’s a stick with an opening and closing brush arrangement at the end.
You put it over the spider with the soft brushes open, then you close them to trap the monster, and open them again to let it scuttle off to its home in the darkest reaches of hell.
Time to try this gizmo out. And, in a surprise development, I made a mess of it. True, the spider was in an awkward position, on a conjunction of two surfaces. I doubted that I’d got it, because I thought I saw it fall into a slightly open drawer. But I couldn’t be sure. As in any encounter on the battlefield, it all happened so quickly.
So, I took the gizmo to the back garden, bearing in mind that I’d look even more of a pillock standing at the doorway in my pants, holding up a plastic stick with brushes on the end like some sort of magic wand.
When I opened the brushes, nothing emerged. So, I went back and searched the drawer gingerly and saw it scuttle off into some garments to hide. It was in my “speciality” drawer: the one that houses stuff I only wear on occasion: pyjamas and dressing gown for hospital, long johns for particularly cold winter days, and swimming trunks – not for swimming, obviously; such a lot of nonsense – for the sauna.
One by one, I removed the garments and, fearfully, shook them out. Nothing. Which meant the beast was still in the bedroom somewhere.
A man in my position cannot be seen sleeping with the light on. But I could resume listening to an audio recording of The Hobbit to soothe me. Upon which, I found Bilbo and the dwarves just about to enter Mirkwood – where the giants spiders lived. Aargh!
