No fun for arachnophobes

It was so bad that I enrolled on a fear of flying course - and I flew just a few weeks after.

Cured.

But I also have a fear of spiders. It doesn’t matter if they are the spindly kind, the tiny kind or the big, fat hairy kind; any spider sets my heart racing and turns my blood cold.

I’m not going to bang on about how frightened I am of arachnids, but let’s just say I will never go to Australia.

Yes, I have written off an entire continent because of my fear.

Almost everyone I know has told me my fear is irrational (in this country).

And I used to believe them - but not anymore. Not after researching the potentially lethal false widow spider.

Apparently the mild weather has caused them to breed like crazy and grow to monstrous proportions and they now deliver a bite that is worse than being shot - if you are allergic to them, which with my luck I am.

I know they haven’t killed anyone yet – but there’s always a first time.

Yesterday, as the Teen and I were leaving the house, she said: “I can hear buzzing by the front door; I think we have a wasp or bees’ nest in the beams.”

I looked and saw a bumble bee being tortured by a spider, which bore the white skeleton head markings of a false widow. Scream.

I saved the bee with a mop and tried to kill the spider.

But it ran off into its nest where I could see what I thought were scores of them.

On closer inspection I counted five more nests that looked exactly the same. Brilliant. An imminent invasion.

I told my friend about my plight and minutes later she grabbed a can of bug killer and a bottle of beer (I thought it was to calm my jangled nerves, but it wasn’t. Bah.) and we headed back to my creepy cottage.

On a rickety ladder, wearing a left hand glove on her right hand, the spray in one hand and sipping from the beer bottle in the other, my BF started aiming at the bugs.

She is recovering from an operation on her right wrist and is getting over pneumonia but still appears to be more capable (and brave) than me.

Just as she had finished the whole can, the spiders began to fall down dead. Good.

I was hugely grateful and reassured by her efforts, but I rang the pest control men anyway – just in case.

One told me not to spray anything in case birds accidently died after eating one of the horrible little spiders.

Whoops.

In fact, he didn’t seem that keen on killing them at all, so his advice had to go.

The other pest control man told me he would come later on with some special powder.

Until this magic man arrives, all the windows are closed and I am not letting anyone use the front door.

I don’t care if we can’t breathe, at least we are safe.

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