Tuesday 21 August 2007

The Spider of Damocles


"Take care when you go through the kitchen door," my boyfriend warned. "What do you mean?" said I, a bit crossly as I was about to stomp through in my normal hasty fashion, always in a rush to do something or get somewhere.
"Look up," he said, with a smirk. I did. Clinging to the doorframe was one of the biggest house spiders I have ever seen. Its leg span must have been 10 cms and that wasn't even at full stretch.
Quietly, cautiously and cringingly, I stepped through. Silly really. These spiders don't bite. They can't harm a human. The annoying daddy-longlegs, aka crane fly, apparently contains enough poison to kill a person, but luckily for us it hasn't been equipped with biting mechanism. So what is the point in all that poison? So it can fly into your salad and lurk under a lettuce leaf, chortling as it awaits the chop, the swallow, the gag and the ambulance? Could I have discovered an unusal way to kill someone off? Do I have a Miss Marple-type crime novel waiting in the literary wings? If that spider doesn't move, I shall never get to my computer again!

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