The Long War
I’m not a phobic person generally. My only irrational fear (as opposed to such rational fears like of cancer or car-crashes) is of spiders.
I really do get the screaming abdabs, having had a couple of nasty experiences with large wolf spiders as a child, such as pulling the duvet back to get into bed and finding a coffee-saucer-sized specimen on my pillow, then feeling something in the bed, crawling slowly and inexorably, higher and higher, up my inner leg…. Arrgh!
I’m generally pretty stoic but that was the only time I was genuinely, shriekingly hysterical. I once found myself alone in the house on a hot and humid night in Georgia with an achingly full bladder and a possibly poisonous, dinnerplate-sized spider between me and the bathroom. Luckily I also had an air rifle. No spider, no problem.
It’s war, a long war, an assymetric war. Spiders hate me and they always have. If there’s a spider within 100 yards radius it will somehow magically appear above my head on the ceiling or horror of horrors (as one arachnojihadi did a couple of nights ago) run across my hands on the keyboard.
The scream could’ve beeen heard for miles had I not been too petrified to make a sound. I just turned and fled to bed, leaving the post unfinished. The spider’s still here somewhere. It’s lurking, waiting for any lapse in my vigilance. Then it’ll pounce.
Now it’s turning autumn it’s only to be expected that more spiders will come indoors, but it does seem that there’re many more of the bloody things than usual – and they’re quite aggressive. They come in waves, 3 or 4 at a time, spinning suicidally towards a crushing book or shoe. I hate to kill them, really i do, but if I pick them up and put them elsewhere they might get on me. No. Nope, that’s not happening.
The sharp rise in arthropod terrorist activity isn’t just my paranoid imagination :
Our houses are crawling with them, our gardens are festooned with their webs and we have got the creeps. A series of mild winters, a wet spring and a fine summer means that arachnids are with us in unusually great numbers. “They’ve made hay while the sun shone,” confirms Stuart Hine, manager of insect (and arachnid) information at the Natural History Museum.
Across the country, numbers are up. Garden spiders have flourished this year, while sightings of the spectacular wasp spider – which arrived from Europe in the 1950s – are double that of 12 months ago.
The multi-legged freedom-haters are finally enacting their evil plan.They’re bringing in the heavy infantry too. Well, we can’t say we weren’t warned.
Bill Bailey (mp3 here) :
“We must stop the destruction of the planet,
We need trees not fac-trees,
Otherwise the creatures of this earth will take back what is rightfully theirs,You know of whom I speak,
They are listening,
They have ears,
Some of them have ears on their knees.
They will rise up and reclaim this worldThey will take us and they?ll make us
Human slaves in an insect nation Arr-arrrr-arruuaarrrr!…
It’s not just the spiders. With the past couple of days’ sudden warmth after so much rain, there’s been another mass hatch of mosquitoes. Normally I’d go round the bedroom last thing at night with bug spray, asassinating the little whining, biting bastards, then I’d slather myself with repellent, But I got complacent and forgot – with the result that the only bits not under the duvet, my hands and face, are swollen and itchy with massive bites. I look hideous.
I see those little eco-terroristic spiders’ change in tactics, don’t think I don’t. Now they’re trying to soften me up with close air support. Well, it won’t work. I will be determined, hyper-alert and poised to repel the coming attack – for attack they will. Have no doubt. They are suiciders and they hate my freedom. This is nothing less than than a war for civilisation, a long war, a war that’ll define the rest of the 21st century.
The spiders, are not insects,
but in a war they will side with the insects.
Traitors, traitors, spider traitors,
they’ll betray us, and they’ll make us…human slaves, in an insect nation!
Arr-arrrr-arruuaarrrr!
Spider photo from Michel Vuijlsteke’s Tuinsafari
Read more: Environment, Global Warming, Europe, Wildlife, Spiders, Arachnids, Arachnophobia, Arthropods, Insects, UK Comedians, Bill Bailey, War on Terror
