Freckles & Doubt

I am currently locked in an Epic and Death-Defying territorial battle with a large spider (either one of those non-poisonous flat wall jobs or a rain spider, I keep forgetting to take a photo for better ID) who appears to be bound and determined to reside in my small abode, whether I like it or not. I have randomly assigned him male gender for no adequately defined reason, the way he waved his legs at me threateningly seemed a bit boyish (also possibly by way of Cosmic Balance since my late lamented orb weavers in the garden were definitely female, given their small husbands huddling nervously at the edge of the web). He is a fairly respectable size, about 10cm across his spread legs, and he clearly comes into the kitchen from the courtyard, he spent about three days lurking in the corner above the glass door.

So, in purely abstract terms, I have no beef with spiders. They are fascinating, and frequently beautiful, and wierdly and satisfyingly alien in shape, and fill an important ecological niche, and I'm generally quite happy to have them bumbling around my ceilings doing arachnoid cull projects on the local mosquito population while I hold occasional one-sided conversations in which I cordially wish them good hunting. I don't dust away occupied webs, and I certainly don't kill spiders, and I will cheerfully rescue any trapped members of the species from the sink (or the bath, had this house a bath, which it doesn't) and put them outside.

But. Atavistic hind-brain functions being what they are, spiders above a certain size make my skin crawl. I am happy with them being on the ceiling in the kitchen, but if one's in my bedroom I can't sleep. It's not even a conscious fear of a poisonous bite, although I would imagine that's the purpose behind the evolutionary aversion - it's rather that the mere idea of all those legs skittering over my flesh is deeply disturbing.

So this member of the tribe has been unusually persistent, and the other night started migrating away from the door towards the bedroom in a way that was simply Not On. I tried my usual infallible technique, which is to poke at him gently with the end of the broom and herd him out of the door into the night, but he took grave exception to that, and simply bunched in his corner and waved his legs. When I persisted, he leaped madly away, startling me into a slightly unladylike screech, and went to ground in the curtains on the glass door. Since I couldn't think of any way to remove him, I muttered imprecations and went to bed, slightly goose-bumped and resolutely leaving the curtains unclosed.

I didn't see him for two days, and thought, hooray, the broom-pokage clearly offended him enough that he left in a Marked Manner. Except. Last night, there he was, on the wall above my bed, approximately at head height, thereby executing a flanking offensive aimed straight at my weak spots with commendable tactical acumen. To make things worse, his presence became apparent (a) at the precise moment when, having read peaceably in bed for an hour, I was about to close down the Ipad to sleep, and (b) under the effects of our current national affliction of load shedding, now at stage six, what the actual fuck, and depriving us of power for anything up to six hours a day. So. Spider, Right There Above My Bed, In the Pitch Dark, it was sheer luck that I moved the torch around to catch him on the wall before switching it off.

There was absolutely no way I was sleeping with him there. The likelihood of him actually leaving the wall to climb onto my bed, mosquito net or person was extremely slim, but tell that to my skin, which at that point was making a spirited attempt to crawl completely off my body and nest on top of my head. (In a perfectly nasty confluence of events, I'd spent the afternoon having the jolly bi-annual mammogram, so was not, shall we say, entirely at peace with my own body anyway, given several hours spent half naked while strangers alternately squidged and prodded my hapless boobs and made comments about them being "busy" and "active". My skin was already sending me rude telegrams even before the spider transpired).

There was nothing for it but the Cup Trick, as learned at my mother's knee. So what ensued was basically a Complicated Juggling Act, initially for Spider, Plastic Cup, Torch and Cardboard Sheet, in which I stuck the clear plastic lentil jar, emptied of lentils, over him and slid a sheet of card under him to trap him. Gibbering slightly, I might add (I'd say me not him, but he was probably feeling something similar), but with, I thought, commendably steady hands. Act 2 was more complicated, because at this point, holding a plastic container at arm's length with a death-grip on the cardboard sheet to make sure he couldn't escape (he was exploring his clear plastic prison with a certain suggestion of what-the-hell and considerably more animation than the Sandman in a similar situation) and the torch clamped under my arm, I arrived at the back door to realise I had foolishly neglected to open it first. This left me with the additional elements of Curtains, Key, Security Gate and Door to juggle with absolutely no hands owing to death-grip and torch.

So, it transpires that modern technology clearly trumps the Atavistic Skin-Crawling, because apparently I have absolutely no problem with jamming a large spider in a plastic cup against my midriff while holding his cardboard lid on in the aforementioned death-grip, using the other hand to navigate the door-opening, and with the torch propped on the egg basket to illumine the torrid scene. It appears that a solid layer of plastic nicely neutralises the usual need to leap six feet backwards from Large Spiders and obsessively check every inch of my clothing in case they've climbed on me while I wasn't looking.

Thereafter it was anticlimactic: I shook him down gently into the bottom of the container, removed the cardboard with the self-congratulatory flourish of a magician pulling the tablecloth out from under a full formal dinner service, and flung him gently, but with authority, into the hedge. Then I went to bed and slept like a baby, with a strangely smug sense of competence and Triumph Against The Odds. With any luck this whole proceeding will outrage him enough that he won't try to return.

I do like spiders, really. In the abstract. Not in the flesh. Not my flesh, anyway.

Gawsh. There's that weird way where a complicated trip hoves to on the horizon for months, as a sort of substantial and slightly threatening mirage, and then suddenly the cats are all over you in generalised insecurity, the netbook contains one and a half finished papers and about twenty different maps to various hotels and universities and medieval abbeys, the suitcase is straining at the seams, there are evil little Clexane syringes in the hand luggage, and the Evil Landlord is tromping around the house preparatory to shunting you off to the airport in the next hour. I have a sort of generalised sensation of "eek". Also, excitement. Also, irritation, because Lufthansa, bless their lack of traditional Teutonic efficiency, won't let me check in online, and I'm terrified I'll end up without an aisle seat, climbing over my compatriots in cattle-class hell at two-hourly intervals until they rise and slay me. I am prepared, if necessary, to wave doctors' letters and weep gently.

I am, however, getting better at this travelling thing. The thought of all the public transport connections between me and my first paper (car to airport, plane to Jhb, plane to Frankfurt, plane to Brussels, tram to station, train to Ghent, tram to hotel, walk to venue) is not in fact inducing panic. I have grown as a person. Also, I am prepared to embrace, regardless of expense and with a sense of wicked self-indulgence, the creed of taxis if pressed to it.

I shall see my mother, post-Nesbitted, in about a week. I shall see the London horde, post-mothered, in about two weeks. I shall see the internet again in just over a day. Excelsior! My banner with a strange device reads "PERAMBULATION".

A couple of weeks ago Carlo emailed me with a quote he vaguely thought might be from DR & Quinch, which he hoped I might vaguely happen to recognise - a completely futile hope, may I add, in that my memory really does bear a striking resemblance to Horace the Cheese (shapeless, incomprehensible and occasionally psychotic). What this did cause me to do was to discover, in the course of otherwise pointless googling, that there's a complete DR & Quinch collection. Which Loot stocks. Which I bought. Which arrived a few days ago, and which I have been joyously re-reading. I feel much more psychotic now, thank you, and at the same time curiously more likely to totally appreciate the minor, like, eccentricities of my more disaffected students.

I used to read 2000 AD back in the days when I was a lone, lorn undergraduate gurrrl in the midst of a largely male role-playing group, causing my inadvertant acquisition of many of their little boyish vices. I loved DR & Quinch for their off-the-wall anarchy, although I suspect I may also have had a sneaking fellow feeling for Chrysoprasia, whose pre-DR state of pastel blonde goody-two-shoes girliness rather resembled mine pre-roleplaying:



Possibly fortunately, I never did actually acquire the taste for off-the-shelf tactical nuclear weapons and associated mayhem, and only partially a taste for Alan Moore.

At any rate, after all that it transpires that the quote in question doesn't seem to be DR & Quinch at all. I'm inclining to darkly suspect it might be Nemesis the Warlock, but perhaps one of you reprehensible lot will recognise it? "All the fish are hollow my dear, and no longer swim at me. We have stopped dreaming that horrible dream of the harp with its strings of spaghetti."

I should also give you fair warning that my subject lines are likely to be DR & Quinch quotes until further notice. Homicidal alien teens are alarmingly quotable.

Memo to self: it's possibly counter-productive to watch Supernatural at night when I'm alone in the house (the Evil Landlord being off at Here Be Dragons), as at a generous estimate I only see about 70% of any one episode, owing to being too scared to look at the screen. The creepy build-up music does it for me every time. This is also causing me to remember that in fact I only used to be able to watch X-Files, back in the day when it was on TV, by dint of importing bumpycat to come and hold my hand every Friday night. I am an enormous wuss. Next plan: watch Supernatural from the other side of the room while filing bills.

On the upside, Sam is cute. On the further upside, Cape Town weather continues bizarre - it's bucketing with rain, and there are branches down all over the garden from the high winds. I am a happy bunny, albeit a quivering, wild-eyed happy bunny convinced there's something under my bed. The main problem is that there often is something under my bed, on account of how Golux likes to go and fossick around in there, among the boxes of role-playing dreck and the small, feral herds of straying boots, making interesting bumping noises in the night. It's probably all good for the moral fibre, if tending to make the nervous fibre a bit twangy.