Funnel Web Spiders

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.

Cat Wars update

Sorry about the extended delay in transmission. I’ve been a bit pushed busy-wise. No excuse really, other than getting ready to do up the weekender, avoiding Christmas and New Year and attending lots of weddings. On that note, by the way, I know you’re not supposed to know about each other (11 weddings in 5 months) but I can’t keep it a secret any longer. Or rather, I’ve realised I don’t need to. You see, when the mantel-piece broke under the weight of the invitations, Oliver and I worried you might think your wonderful special day was a little less special to us because it was number (fill in your own blank here) out of eleven. But, with what my friend Big Andrea calls ‘the easy wisdom of hindsight’, I can now see that even if we went to a hundred weddings this year, each of them would remain special.

We are, in fact, on number 6 this weekend, and so far every one has been beautiful. Uplifting, reassuring, romantic and downright good fun. Thank you, all of you, who have decided to get married at the same time (why?) and thank you especially for not knowing each other so that Oliver and I can get away with the same suit to every single wedding. Oh shit, I wasn’t supposed to tell you that bit. (Think I might miss Oliver out on this month’s distribution list).

Anyhoo, I wasn’t intending to talk about weddings today. I was going to tell you about funnel web spiders, of which the weekender has, at last count, three nests in the garden. If I had known that the New South Wales central coast was the ‘spider capital of the world’ (everything in Australia is the world-capital of something) I’m not sure we’d have bought a house there. In fact, if I had known there was any such a place as the spider capital of the world, I would probably never have left Halesowen. I wonder what Halesowen is the world-capital of?

But, before I get to the spiders I have to give you an update – by popular demand – on Cat Wars. I think last time I wrote I was surrounded by flashing teeth and torn fur. Well, we tried the cat-calming spray but it didn’t work and I couldn’t bring myself to go to a cat therapist. Karen, our hippy friend, offered to come and do reiki on Nip but…well, frankly I’d rather go the the psycatrist. So, with heavy hearts, we decided we had to give Tuck away. He is, of course, the victim in all of this, but Nip travels up the coast better (although she insists on smoking all the way and won’t wear a seat-belt). It was absolutely heart-breaking letting Tuck go but we found a good home for him with friends of friends, and deposited him there the day before we left for the UK.

‘I just know’ said Oliver, ‘we’ll never see him again’.

We got back to Australia to a gentle voicemail from Tuck's new house and then a less gentle, indeed somewhat insistent, series of text messages. Tuck was ok but not what they had wanted i.e. a cat. You know, something that came out of the cupboard sometimes. They were a bit bored of finding an empty food bowl and a full litter tray and having no other discernible evidence of owning a pet. Typical Tuck, all pussy and no cat, he was too scared to meet his new owners even after three weeks.

Oliver and I pretended to be disappointed and dragged Tuck from beneath a chest-of-drawers to kiss and cuddle him all the way home. Ginger Nips, as you can imagine, isn’t best pleased. She’s calmed down now and only tries to attack him when he moves but Oliver and I are refusing to live behind closed doors or in a segregated household. Tuck is going to have to toughen up, Ginger is going to have to learn to share her territory and Oliver and I are going to have to get used to the hissing, screaming, yowling world of cats.

Oh bugger, I ran out of space for the spiders.

If you don't know what to do, do what you ought to do.

I think I’ve made my mind up to go back to full-time work.  I’ll be honest though, I’m still struggling with the decision.  I hadn’t realised until this week how much of my sense of self is built around the fact that I have afternoons free whilst no-one else does.  I might drive a shoddy old car (sorry Bella!) and can’t afford to eat out, but every afternoon spent on the beach makes me feel like a millionaire.  Am I crazy giving all this up?

‘You know my theory?’ says Andrea when I tell her about my quandry.  ‘If you can’t decide what to do, always do what you ought to do.  Because, frankly, when you can’t decide what to do, whatever you end up doing you’ll slightly regret not doing the other thing.  But at least if you do what you ought to do, that way it’s a lesser regret.  Also, it’s just an easier decision.  Like tidying up.  If you don’t know where to start, always start on the left’

Andrea is giving me this advice in the local supermarket slash methadone-clinic-waiting-room where I’ve bumped into her shopping with poor little Tom.  As methadonians in various states of dementia stumble around us, we stand chatting whilst poor little Tom, carefully out of his mother’s line of sight, stands unwrapping one of the cheeses.

‘But what if you don’t know what you ought to do?’ I say.  I’m whingeing, I can hear it, but I really can’t help it.  Poor little me, shall I increase my income by 30% or not?  Andrea, single-mother, single income, is patient with me.

‘You always know.  You might be pretending you don’t, which is why you’re in a quandry, but if you’re honest with yourself you do know.  And if you don’t, then ask a friend.’

So I ask her but before she can respond she spots poor little Tommy with half a wheel of brie in his mouth.  ‘Tommy!’ she screams, loud enough to scare the poor innocent methodonians around us, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?!’  I make my excuses and hurry along to canned vegetables.

On the subject of our local supermarket I have to repeat a story which Zen told me the other day.  He was in there once, a couple of months ago, when two of the methodonians started arguing at the checkout.  By the way, Zen’s allowed to tell this story because he works with metho’s, and indeed addicts and the homeless of all shapes and sizes, and is generally so right on that he’s allowed to laugh at them sometimes.  Has to laugh at them sometimes, I suspect.  Anyway,  two of them are arguing at the checkout, a man and a woman, each uglier than the other, getting loud in public and proactively Not Caring.  

You know that whiney, nasal voice they get when they shout and swear?  Ng ng ng, na na na.  So these two are screaming and spitting at each other and everyone else in the supermarket is trying to pretend it’s not happening when the male of the two, to close the argument before stomping off, yells at the top of his voice:  ‘Ah, shat yar facking face.  I buys you pies and fucks you don’t I?’  

Isn’t that sweet?  Who says there are no gentlemen left in the world?

Zen is less patient with my quandry than Andrea.  He thinks I'm a lazy slacker who doesn't know the meaning of hard-work and could do with a year down the mines to teach me.  More about Zen's stories of life in the mines another time (think rows of hard men with morning-semi's in the shower), for the moment I think maybe he's right.  He says I'm a hedonist, but I say who wouldn't be if they could afford it?

'Maybe that's the issue' says Zen.  'Maybe you've just realised that you can't yet afford it (you lazy git).'

I start interviews on Thursday.