House of Horrors

So I'm morbidly afraid of spiders. Except daddy long legs, which infest our house and are really quite charming in their spindly little way and I tell myself they keep other, more gruesome eight legged guests away.

Some people say they're afraid of spiders and then they approach the huntsman the size of a dinner plate casually hanging around on their lounge room wall and somehow whisk it up into a dust pan and deposit it neatly outside. I get heart palpitations just watching that kind of activity. I couldn't even enter the room. Those things move like greased lightning and then they take their big, hairy, bulbous bodies and conceal them into the tiniest, darkest little corners and lie in wait for your face to get near before springing out: "Hey! Hey! Heeeeeeyyyy!"

I have pointed out to Grumpy that if he ever gets a job in Sydney, it could seriously put a dent in our married lives together. We might have to become a trans-continental couple. You know what I'm talking about: funnel webs. I only have a restful night's sleep in Sydney when we're visiting people who live 50 stories up in one of those sterile, floodlit, hospital-white apartment blocks. Unfortunately we don't know anyone who lives like that so most of my nights in Sydney are fitful and restless as I listen out for the stealthy rustle of funnel webs stalking me. Many is the night in Sydney I have cuddled up to Grumpy in the dark and whispered, "Do you think they have funnel webs here?" And he, patient but tragically honest, has replied, "Why, yes, I'm positive they do." The rest of the night is a series of shrieks from me, "What was that?! What was that?!"

We had some wild winds here on Saturday night and Grumpy had a bad night's sleep. I left him slumbering and got up to have a shower. I didn't put the light on in the bathroom straight away and poked around in the cupboard in the dark for a few minutes before getting in the shower. When I got out, I opened the cupboard door again and there crawling around on the nice white shelf was a jet-black, fat little prophet of doom, barely able to walk straight due to the effort required to drag along its massive, dripping fangs. Naturally I screamed the house down and my blessed Grumpy was instantly awake and called out, "Is there a spider?" and was there in moments to kill and destroy. He then gave me news that made my heart sing: "I wondered how long it would be before this happened. There's a gap at the back of the cupboard that leads straight outside, and I've seen legs in there." Legs. Give me the heart of darkness any day. Just spare me the legs.

These kinds of incidents haunt me. Last night I was lying in bed fretting about the spider and its millions of relatives all snuggled down in that open space at the back of my bathroom cupboard and it took a mighty effort of will to not check what I was sure was crawling through my hair as my scalp tingled and my skin crawled.

Honestly. The things I go through. You'll never know.