No I don't mean the band although I have always thought it might just be the best band name I've ever heard of.
Let me say this first: I am an animal lover.
A once-was vegetarian who is still unable to debone any animal and who goes weeks without feeding her family red meat; a 'let's relocate that cockroach/cricket/caterpillar' girl currently happily living with an enormous grasshopper in the living room.
It's just spiders.
Really. Really. Hate. Spiders.
Look I don't know what it's about. It's a primal and totally irrational fear.
It started when I was young, about 12 I think, when I woke up with an intricate spiderweb right across my face. Not a lightweight one, either.
Then there was an incident in the early days of my courtship with the Adman, where I was sitting, relaxed, in the passenger seat of his car, with his mother, sister and aunt across the back seat, when an enormous hairy huntsman (WARNING: images may disturb) crawled up the outside of my open window and hung about, considering its descent on the inside.
I may have screamed. I may have leapt across onto the gearstick. We may have been on a very busy road (actually, the off-ramp of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. 4 lane highway. Pretty busy.)
Adam calmly asked me to get off the gearstick before he caused an accident, and I (and I still fail to feel remorse for this) took off my shoe, wacked the scary spider, and sent it flying onto the neighbouring car, a beaten up combi van driven by two fellas busy laughing at the screaming coming from our car. Karma, dudes.
Then there was another car-based incident when Henry was a tiny baby, I was driving my sister Naomi to the airport one night with Henry in the back in his seat, when Nomie started slapping the dashboard with her Bare Hands. (Am still deeply impressed.) Unfortunately failed to kill the spider trotting over to my side and I nearly killed us all running off the road but thankfully just destroyed the hubcaps on the left hand side.
And then last week.
Over at a darling friend's house nearby, leaving late, pull the car out from the curb and an enormous spider crawls across my windscreen. I quickly put my wipers and water on, thinking I'll kill it (sorry spiders, it's me or you) and succeed in jimmying it over to my side window whereby it glares at me then vanishes into my doorframe. I park (actually I just pull the keys out; I'm pretty much in the middle of the road), I roll out the passenger side door and run back into my friend's house.
She comes out armed with Mortein which she lets loose on the Prius on the proviso I wash the car the next day so as not to damage the paint. But there is no sign of the beast.
She looks at me. I look at her. She suggests driving me home in her car to get Adam (it's 10.30pm, I know he's asleep on the couch) which I think is a marvellous idea.
We pull up, I run in and wake him up and explain he needs to drive back to our friend's house and drive our car home, carrying on it somewhere a huntsman the size of a small country. He amiably agrees and I think (again) how lucky I was he picked me.
So the next morning, I get the kids in the car and I get in via the passenger side (just in case) and we drive around the block to the nearest carwash (for the first time in a year I'm happy to live in the inner city).
I ask whether thorough hosing underneath the car comes with the deluxe wash and they say it can be arranged. I explain the potential traveller. The carwash dude doesn't laugh at me.
The kids and I wait inside the cafe (it's a hip carwash/cafe. Free flat white and baby cino's for the kids) and after 20 minutes the dude comes back and tells me they've found it and they decided to kill it rather than relocate it, given it's size.
I consider the appropriateness of kissing him, decide against it, kiss the children instead.
And we're all good.
Till next time.
Because there will always be a next time.
I am spider bait.
Really, I should just catch the bus.
xxx
