Patsy Crawford scribbling away
There’s nothing like a spider story to set the pulse racing and the brow breaking out in a cold sweat.
I mention this because summer is upon us and along with the raspberries, the cold beers and the badly barbecued sausages we can expect the usual contingent of bloody big huntsmen to come scuttling across our walls and ceilings.
What purpose they serve I refuse to acknowledge, even when spidery people disdainfully inform me they keep the flies in line and fit neatly into the vast jigsaw puzzle of nature.
I’m having none of that talk, thank you very much. In my book, places where spiders may be permitted to show their face are limited to the jungle, to be poked and prodded at by David Attenborough; the zoo, in a glass case secure enough to withstand having a hand grenade thrown at it; and in Donald Trump’s underpants.
We’re a funny lot, us spider worriers. Huntsman in particular seem to strike in us the sort of terror you’d associate with having Freddy Krueger knock on our front door. It was ever thus. Even in childhood, in the days when we called them triantelopes, huntsmen put the fear of god into us. Nothing has changed. To illustrate the point, I give you two women travelling.
So, they’re heading home at night from Hobart towards Broadmarsh when a mega-triantelope rips up the passenger door and across the dashboard. This was a humdinger of a spider. Naturally the women did what any normal woman would do under the circumstances. They started screaming their heads off.
Possibly invigorated by this reaction, the spider hovered behind the dashboard waving its legs in the air. More screaming ensued, now accompanied by erratic driving. Keeping a terrified eye on the dash the women sped the car into an IGA store, where one leapt out to buy insect spray while the other armed herself with weaponry, i.e. a shoe.
Repellent to hand the two journeyed pluckily on, not before spraying enough insecticide down the dash to stun an ox and with the passenger now bringing her mobile phone into play as a torch. They’re still screaming. The driving is still wobbly. The insecticide fumes are making them feel faint.
Anyone passing the car on the road would have seen one woman hunched tensely over the steering wheel, another woman hunched forward training her phone on the dashboard,. Faint screams may be heard.
Through the night they went, women and spider, joined in terror. Finally, they got home. The women leapt from the car, leaving behind a huntsman that could not possibly have withstood all those fumes, plus the shrivelling bodies of every insect in the car. Men from the house were despatched to deal with the aftermath. The women drank too much Chardonnay.
It’s just another spider anecdote but all you dear readers who are fellow arachnophobe travellers will be as one with it. Christmas is nigh.
May peace be with you and may triantelopes never scurry across your dashboard.
