Yes folks, Summer is over, the sun failed to shine on TV or in the sky for that matter, yet Autumn itself still presents new opportunities, everyone is still in t-shirts and shorts for as long as they can manage, music festivals are still on, the football season is back up and running, and if you’re embarking on a new relationship, it’s a still good time to be loved up as well … lucky bastards !!
However, Autumn is also the very worst time of year, for one simple reason ... it's house spider season.
Which means very year, right about now, thousands of the godless eight-legged little buggers emerge from the bowels of hell with the sole intention of inflicting torment on the unwary. To a committed arachnophobe like me, house spider season is like living inside a live-action version of the classic 1990's computer game “DOOM”. My bedroom is transformed into a sort of white-knuckle ride-cum ghost house in which dropping your guard, even for a moment, can have dire, unimaginable consequences.
A while ago for instance, after a stint at the pub, I woke at 04:00 am for a dozy trip to the lavatory. As I sat there, blearily performing the necessaries, in the dark, a spider the size of a small dog unexpectedly crawled out from behind the toilet and scampered across my bare right foot.
I reacted like I'd been blasted in the coccyx with a taser. Sheer blind panic took control of my body before the need to ‘stop going’ had even registered in my brain. You can imagine the aftermath.
Actually, no, don't imagine the aftermath ...
Many years ago, when I was a student, I was helping to prepare a meal for a video we were shooting in a hall of residence kitchen, when some demented jester ran in from the garden carrying a massive spider he'd found outside. Having made a couple of the girls scream, he then decided to lunge with it, open-handed, in my general direction.
Without even thinking, I swiped at his face with the equally enormous and dangerously sharp kitchen knife I was holding in a desperate bid to stave him and his eight-legged friend off.
Fortunately, I missed him, and then UNFORTUNATELY it meant that I had to spend the next four and a half hours listening to him self-righteously bleating on and on and on and on and on and on about how I very nearly killed him and how he was only having a laugh. I just shrugged back to him; “Don't startle someone with a knife in their hand unless you're prepared to face the consequences, you doughnut. Next time you might not be so lucky.” I said.
And please don’t use this as an excuse to mark me down as a complete and utter wuss. I don’t find snakes or rats to be scary and there are people who are utterly terrified of them. People can be scared of harmless things like water or totally random things like the number thirteen. Fear of spiders or snakes isn't a choice, but an evolutionary trait that some have and some don't, just as some people can roll their tongues and others can't.
Don’t get me wrong, if faced with the prospect of tackling a spider, and particularly if I happen to be in the presence of a lady who is so wracked with fear that she has had her own panic room built to avoid them, then I will grudgingly wade into action armed with something suitably solid in order to smash it out of existence … an army boot for instance.
And even that still probably wouldn't be heroic enough to persuade her to be my girlfriend …
Oh, and please note that I certainly AM authorising the use of lethal force as a default option. There is NO excuse for ANY of this messing around with pint glasses and sheets of card and 'putting him back outside'. He'll just crawl straight back IN again, stupid !!
I mean, if an escaped prison convict climbed in through your bedroom window you wouldn't stick a massive pint glass over his head and 'put him back in the garden' would you ?? You wouldn't feel safe until you saw him in handcuffs and with blood running down his nose after a good beating from the long arm of the law. It's the same with spiders. If it's not been reduced to a gritty, twitching little smear and then flushed down the bog encased in several layers of toilet roll, it's not been dealt with at all.
All of which prompts the question of why the Army doesn't get involved; think about it, a dedicated anti-arachnid task-force that could turn up at your home in the dead of night and use a rubber mallet to splat that absolute whopper that ran under the cupboard an hour ago and has left you unable to sleep ever since.
Failing that, I recommend having some dynamite and a chainsaw handy until next Spring.
Sweet dreams, everyone.