Now I’m not usually scared of spiders – if I see one in the house I normally let it carry on with it’s daily business and we all live in domestic harmony.   But this spider was different…

The first time I saw it was one evening just as I was entering the bedroom – there it was big, black with hairy legs scurrying across the headboard of the bed. I let out a shriek, mainly because it was so unexpected. Phil, my husband, rushed into the bedroom asking what was the matter? “A huge, black spider just ran across the headboard” I explained and estimated the size with my hands. He looked at me disbelievingly, a spider THAT big, never. I nervously got into bed and had a restless night, dreaming of spiders running across me while I slept.

Every time I passed the bedroom the following day I would put my head in and see if I spied the spider – no, nothing until the evening when again going into the bedroom there it was, this time on the footboard of the bed, again scurrying (I like that word!) to safety underneath the bed.   Again I shrieked but Phil didn’t see it. “Perhaps you should keep quiet the next time you see it and it won’t run off” he suggested.  Another restless night with the combination of the spider situation and the hot weather (I couldn’t sleep on top of the duvet for fear of the spider running over me!)

Then Phil saw the spider and he had to agree it was pretty big. It ran under the bed and Phil pulled up the mattress to find it, but it had disappeared.   I went to my side of the bed and there it was, but again, it ran under the bed. I’d had enough by now and told Phil that I wouldn’t be coming to bed until it was found. So we waited and waited: nothing!   We were tired so the lamp was switched off and we tried to go to sleep.

About five minutes later Phil said “Shall I put the light back on and see if it is around?” As I was sweating under the duvet I agreed. He switched the lamp on and we both looked on our sides of the bed to see if it was around. “This is like one of those comedy horror films when they’re looking around for the spider and it’s above them on the headboard all the time” I joked. With that Phil looked at our headboard and there it was! Large as life and probably smiling menacingly at us.

Now I go back to the original paragraph where I state that I normally let the spiders carry on with their business, but I’m sorry not this one, it had caused me two restless nights and now it was just taunting us. Phil grabbed his weapon of choice, my flip flop and flattened it.   It fell onto the bed defeated.

After Phil had disposed of the body, we lay in bed happy in the knowledge that we were spider free.

“Perhaps that was the mummy spider and now the bigger, hairier, blacker daddy spider will come and look for her” said Phil just before we went to sleep.

Bugger, another restless night!

“That moment when you walk into a spider’s web and suddenly turn into a karate master.”