It is giant spider season and I am delighted. As someone who is ravaged by flying insects all summer, I welcome these eight-legged death machines into my home with open arms. Speckle-backed Tegeneria? Be my guest! I would far rather something that looks like an animated tomato stalk occasionally scuttled across my curtain than be beset by a swarm of fruit flies, bluebottles or midges. I have even heard that spiders might eat clothes moths, although I think for them to have a significant impact on numbers I would have to lean even further into my Miss Havisham alter ego and stroll around bedecked by webs.
I wasn’t always this way. As a child, I was as terrified of spiders as I am today by droughts and unfiled tax returns. I would watch in amazed horror as my country-born mother picked up arachnids the size and heft of dogs and calmly threw them out the window. There were whole cupboards I refused to open for fear of spiders. Once, after accidentally walking into a web during a game of hide and seek, I actually vomited at the thought of a spider being close to my skin (they found me quite quickly after that).
But then, in my 20s, I lived on my own for the first time. During my year of renting a converted bakery in Leeds (where the storage heaters never worked and I did the washing-up under the electric shower), there were two spiders that lived in the corners of those high, heat-sucking ceilings. I didn’t have a ladder tall enough to reach them – and I wouldn’t have wanted to touch them even if I could. So I came to accept that as long as they stuck to their domain, ate their fill and never came anywhere near my bed, we could coexist in mutually assured potential terror.
So spiders and I are fine. Just don’t ask about slugs.
Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
