Years ago, when Oliver and I were in London and sort-of kind-of deciding to move to Australia, I booked myself onto an arachnophobia course at London Zoo. No, not a course that teaches you how to be scared of spiders, quite the opposite. It was a one-day course which you passed by being able to trap a large house-spider under a glass, slide a piece of card underneath and carry it across the room. If you think this sounds like not much of a big deal, well woopy-doo, you don’t need to go on the course.
I did. Most people who knew me back then will attest to a Ged Is Scared of Spiders story, my favourite being about the small vietnamese house I nearly knocked down trying to escape a large, green specimen in the bathroom. Apparently they hadn’t heard a white man scream like that since the sixties.
The course at London Zoo was very effective and just the other day I was sharing a shower with a big black beast thinking ‘I couldn’t have done this ten years ago’ (clearly, this is only true about spiders). The course was based, largely, on teaching its audience about our eight-legged friends, explaining what amazing creatures they are and, above all, how vulnerable they are. The poor wee things only move quickly because they have to, to avoid being eaten. They will not run towards you because, no matter how scared you are of them, they are far more terrified of you. There is nothing a spider could do to ever harm you. And so on and so forth, then a bit of deep-hypnosis and bob’s your uncle, look at the cute little spidey widey with all his funny legs. Definitely worth the money.
The weird thing is the course still works, all these years later. Sure I may scream like a banshee, pull my elbows in and dance around on my tip-toes singing Kate Bush at the very idea of a spider, but push-comes-to-shove I can actually put a glass over one (as long as Oliver does that bit with the card). Trust me, this is a vast improvement on my pre-zoo days. The reason I say it’s weird is because all that stuff they tell you at London Zoo simply isn’t true out here. Spiders move so fast in Australia so they can catch you quicker. They will only run away from you in a mock retreat, hoping you will follow and fall into their man-trap. They can do you harm.
I know all of this you see because I’ve been researching funnel web spiders. The CSIRO (Commonwealth Something about Science and Research) has a fascinating fact-sheet on them with advice such as ‘bites have resulted in death’, ‘if bitten, only move if necessary’ and ‘fang bases extend horizontally from the front of the head (do not check this on a live spider!).’ Whoever felt the need to add that last parenthesis clearly does not live in the same universe as me.
The reason I’ve been researching funnel webs is I have found, in our garden at Copacabana, several examples of what the CSIRO call ‘burrows lined with a sock of opaque white silk and several strong strands of silk radiating from the entrance’. Basically it’s a ten-pence-piece sized hole with a huge pair of eyes at the other end. Karen, my hippy friend, has suggested that if you pour water down the hole often enough the fellow-inhabitant-of-the-universe will get annoyed and walk off to live somewhere out of your way. Big Andrea, whose normally wiser in such situations, proposes that the water should be boiling. Ignoring Karen’s disapproval, she goes on to warn that this takes some time to kill the spider, which will exit its burrow furious with the world and looking for someone to bite before it dies. ‘You might want to stand well back’ she says.
Last time we were up at Copa a local friend of ours, Zen, was around. (Sorry – yes, we have a friend called Zen. Three awful things about this. 1. He is actually very laid-back, easy-going and, I hate to say it, zen-like. 2. His name was originally Xen (chinese parents) and he found that ‘explaining that an x can sound like a zee made me sound like a Sesame Street narrator’. 3. He surfs). Anyway, I said to Zen ‘Let’s pour boiling water down the funnel-web holes and watch the spiders come out!’. Unfortunately he saw straight through my ‘wouldn’t that be fun’ façade to the ‘and I can hide behind you’ reality beneath it. He went pale (not easy for an over-tanned, chinese surfer) and told me he’d read that funnel web spiders could jump. A metre at least, he reckoned. There’s not a lot fazes your average Aussie male but snakes, spiders and multisyllabic words will do it. I let him get out of it and moved the conversation on, the two us gingerly stepping up to the house before darkness fell. ‘Male funnel-webs wander at night. Females are sedentary, only venturing out momentarily to grab passing prey.’
So I haven’t done anything about it yet. OK, I’ll be honest, I sprayed some napalm-like bug-killer down there, but apparently this just gives them a sore throat. So the holes are there, three of them in the garden, on and around the path, echoing to the sound of spiders coughing. Karen suggests I make sure I don’t go out barefoot at night. Go out? At night? I don't think so.
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