Tag Archives: spider

When Spiders Attack

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When my youngest, Christopher, toddled out of nursery with the bearing of a cool-headed bomb disposal technician, concentrating deeply on the concaved plastic receptacle in his hands, I assumed he’d nicked it. Little kids are magpies, this one more than most. His pockets are museums to all manner of misappropriated treasures. It wasn’t until I got closer to him that I noticed a spider shuffling up and sliding down the bottom of the bowl, a pointless ritual undertaken beneath the disinterested gaze of its new God.

“He’s called Timmy,” Christopher told me.

“Hi Timmy,” I said.

“He’s big,” I said. And hairy. And kind of ‘hard’ looking. The sort of spider who’d walk up and punch you for looking at him funny.

Christopher is going through a creepy-crawly phase. Whether he’s just out of the shower or freshly donned in white or cream clothes, there’s nothing he likes better than to find a big mound of dirt and thrust as much of himself into it as possible, his hands retreating from that brown treasure chest laden with muck and worms and snails and woodlice. He’s like Steve Irwin meets Indiana Jones, a collector of living totems. Timmy belonged to Christopher now, whether he liked it or not. At least until Christopher got bored.

I’m not a great fan of spiders, but I hate flies with an even greater passion, so following the logic of the old proverb that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ I was content to regard Timmy as at least an acquaintance, if not exactly a pal.

Christopher carried that spider all the way home, never letting his gaze stray from it. When his older brother, Jack, met us coming out of his class he regarded the spider jealously, like it was a new 3D TV or a Playstation 5.

“Maybe check it out for a wee while then let it go in the garden,” I said. I left them in the house with their gran and aunty, then drove back to work. When I returned a few hours later the spider had been forgotten, by me as much as by the kids. That was a mistake. Like the bit in Jaws where everyone thought it was safe to go back into the water again – though I’m not suggesting for a second that sharks are anywhere near as terrifying as spiders. At least a shark won’t crawl across your face while you’re sleeping, or crawl up your toilet bowl to get up your bum.

I was in the kitchen cooking a stir-fry (the meal is irrelevant, I just wanted there to be documentary evidence that a) I cooked occasionally, and b) I didn’t just eat pizzas all the time) when I heard an almighty scream from the living room. Screams are so ubiquitous in my house that they’re almost a background thrum, like the low-level buzz of the TV or the clinky-gur-gur of the fridge, so I hot-footed rather than fled to the living room. Chris is a clumsy wee fella and I reasoned he’d probably mis-timed a daredevil stunt betwixt foot-rest and couch, or simply suddenly and randomly tripped over his own feet, as he’s prone to do.

“What happened?” I asked my mum as I moved in to wrest him from his granny and wrap my arms around the red-faced little cherub.

“Bloody thing bit him,” said my mum.

“What bit him?” I asked incredulously, forgetting that the spider had ever existed, my brain refusing to even consider it as a suspect. It’s like if you were in a house with two men and a penguin, and you walked into the room, and one of the men was lying dead on the floor and the other man turned to you and said: ‘It bloody killed him!’ You’d whirl your head around 360 degrees looking for a human assailant, even if you clocked the penguin standing at your feet clutching a bloodied knife and shouting ‘I’LL KILL AGAIN! I’LL KILL THEM ALL!’ before laughing maniacally.

“Penguin!” you’d shout. “Do you know who did this?”

A spider bit him? Really? Sure, it was a tough-looking spider, but surely it wasn’t ‘pick-a-fight-with-a-tiny-giant’ tough? It was still a garden spider… wasn’t it? Oh please God let it be a garden spider, and not some diminutive banana-box refugee from the Isle of Biteos, somewhere off the Dominican coast.

“It latched on to his finger and he had to shake it a few times to get it off,” said my mum, shock and concern impaling her words.

Timmy was standing nonchalantly, nay, defiantly, on the floor in the centre of the room. I upturned the receptacle he’d arrived in and placed it over him like a Perspex prison. I could imagine him in there giving himself makeshift tattoos with a match-stick, and playing eight harmonicas at once.

The tip of Christopher’s index finger was swollen. He cried for a few minutes, but managed, through his huffing sobs, to ask if he was going to turn into Spiderman. I knew I had to keep the spider until I could be certain it was a benign specimen, and Christopher wasn’t going to have a bad reaction to its bite. But I had to let my little lad know that justice would be done, and would be as swift as it was brutal.

“No-one bites my little boy,” I told Christopher, as he cuddled into his gran. He looked up at me with a grimly serious face. “I’m going to splat it for what it did to you. Does that sound good?”

He locked eyes with me, and gave a grave, mob boss’s nod. Timmy’s fate was sealed. Eight concrete boots coming up. The perspex prison in which the condemned arachnid languished had been upgraded from Super-Max to Death Row.

Thankfully, hours later, Christopher seemed to be suffering no ill effects, beyond a sudden reappraisal of his relationship to spiders. Even still, I phoned the NHS for advice, and courted public opinion on Facebook (which ranged from ‘He’ll be fine’ to ‘I’m not being funny, but a house spider bit me once and my tits and legs fell off and a piece of my spleen exploded’). And all the while Timmy sat there, alone, trapped, perhaps as a fly priest buzzed by and read him his last rites through the plastic.

But Timmy was lucky to have bitten a merciful human. The little spider’s stay of execution came as I was cuddling Christopher in his bed, trying to coax him to sleep with the usual mixture of soothing and seething.

“I don’t think we should kill the spider, daddy,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m bigger than him and maybe he thought I was going to kill him.”

I nodded. “Then I’ll let him go. And he can start a new life somewhere else.”

“Maybe get a wife,” he said.

“Now, come on, Christopher, don’t wish that on him. I thought we were being merciful. We’d be better off killing him.”

OK, I didn’t say that last part.

After he’d gone to sleep I paid a visit to Timmy. I lifted the lid of his prison a crack and slid a few pieces of cucumber and a tiny crumb of chicken nugget in next to him.

“You’re lucky this wasn’t your last meal, you eight-legged dick,” I told Timmy. He just sort of stared at me. I could’ve sworn he said something about fava beans and a nice chianti, but maybe I just imagined it.

All things considered?

I think we should get a tarantula.

Toast tae the Lassies

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This is the full text of a ‘To the Lassies’ speech I wrote and read out for a Burns’ Night my friend held at his house two years ago. Most of the assembled laughed, and understood it was all in the name of tomfoolery; one middle-aged woman sat and stared at me in the hope that she could make me die with the power of her mind. 

Toast Tae the Lassies

Women. Pffttt…

That’s all I’ve got. 

‘Does my thought-pattern look fat in this?’

That certainly won’t shock you, because traditionally men are more taciturn than women. That’s a polite way of saying that they never fucking shut up. A woman can talk for three days without getting a dry throat, without threat of an empty mouth, and on subjects as diverse as ‘blah blah blah’ and ‘shoes’.

Women don’t transmit on our frequency. That’s when they bother to speak in our language in the first place. Science has proved this. A study was done comparing communication and language between the sexes, looking at what we say, how we say it and how we are received and perceived, and it found that what a woman says, the content of their speech, isn’t NEARLY as important… as the size of her tits.

‘Do you know how hard it is to get four comfortable pairs of Jimmy Choos?’

Women project their voices like missiles. Let’s put it this way: if the female black widow could talk, it wouldn’t need to murder its mate after sex. In fact the human female’s recourse to conversation appears, to the black widow, an unspeakably savage act. A woman won’t so much argue that black is white, but that both of these are wrong, and who do they think they’re talking to?

It wasn’t always like this. We never used to have to listen to women speak. It used to be legal to hit them with a frying pan, or water-board them in a vat of warm piss. We miss those days.

For some enlightenment on the subject we have to journey back to pre-Enlightenment times, and to a man named Institoris who wrote a medieval guide to identifying and prosecuting witches. I’ll quote the preface in the Malleus Maleficarum, which reads:

Wooooooooooooooo Bo-dy Fo-horm, Body Form for yoooooooooooooo!

“Why is the treachery which leads to the practice of harmful magic and all that entails found more frequently in women than in men? Institoris lists women’s usual weaknesses – they are backbiting, vengeful, lascivious, impressionable and intellectually inferior (those are the GOOD ones) – before saying that wicked women (the qualification is important) are particularly ruled by three moral failings (just three?): infidelitas (defined as a lack of adherence to the probable truth of the reality of things invisible – you know, like men’s faults) ostentation and lust.” 

I don’t think there are many here tonight who would disagree with those sentiments. Most of this can probably be attributed to hormones, with the emphasis on moans. Yes, hormones, and the dreaded ‘P’ word, that only five men in the history of the planet have been brave enough to utter. 

Periods are like the Kaiser Soze of biological processes. The greatest trick that women ever pulled was in trying to convince the male world that periods didn’t exist. So when a woman, light and electric from blood loss and mood imbalance has stabbed you through the heart, ripped it out and fed it to you – recognise this, men: it’s your fault. 

‘Flesh, chocolate. It’s all the same to me! Nomnomnomnom!’

Anyone who’s ever worked with a group of women knows that, as a group, they’re a deadly force to be reckoned with. Throw a puppy into their midst, and get ready to make dog soup with the bones. Women working in packs are like piranhas, but with better shoes.

And then there’s the connected danger and mystical horror that is cycle synchronisation. Like when the planets align and some evil wizard uses the formation to open a Gateway to Hell. Cycle synchronisation is like a Mexican wave of hatred.

‘All this fuss over a few fucking shepherds?’

Western culture has fooled us about women. We’re raised with the image of the nurturing, peaceful mother. The kind with big loving bingo wings that would make a flying squirrel grey with envy, and a pendulous, blobby bosom that could double as a wrecking ball. A lot of people, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, believe that if women were to rule the world it would be a happy, fluffy, lovey-dovey place with no war, struggle or strife. Then along came Margaret Thatcher. Lacking a heart, Thatcher was all cunt, and the monthly blood flow was suitably redirected. The Belgrano was torpedoed, in a metaphorical sense of course, by Thatcher’s tampon. 

Women cry. This has also fooled men, who equate crying with caring, and also see crying as a last resort, like suicide, or films starring Renee Zellwegger. But crying does not equal caring, because women, rather alarmingly, cry when they’re confused, startled, hopeful, ambivalent, guilty, ticked off, jealous, happy, furious, clumsy, dopey, sneezy and horny. Maybe that last one’s just me. They never actually cry when they’re sad. No, that’s what shouting’s for.

So how did women become so powerful? What went wrong? Women’s faces not being as soft as the hands that do their dishes? Women NOT doing the Shake and Vac to put the freshness back? 

John McCririck’s favourite wanking picture.

We can trace alot of it back to the suffragette movement. Back at the turn of the twentieth century, one woman’s desire to be heard was so strong that she hurled herself under a horse. If only more women would follow this example.

They burned their bras. Why? Didn’t they realise that their resulting bad back would have to be treated by a male chiropractor?

They started to play sports! The cheek. A little tip: stick to gymnastics, or naked jelly wrestling, or we’re not fucking interested.

And now there are women in the military. Great. Whose smart idea was it to teach them how to kill? And will somebody please ask Gordon Brown much it costs to produce Kevlar vests that can accommodate pairs of breasts? Not to mention the expense of military-issue tampons. No wonder they can’t afford any fucking helicopters over there. 

‘Want to see my big vessel, Punk Space Whore?’

They’ve been in space, too. How long before we see a fatal accident due to a woman shuttle-pilot trying to reverse park behind the Mir space station? Women have no business being in space, unless it’s to get shagged by Captain Kirk.

A lot of people say that women are just good for cooking, cleaning, shagging and gestating young. This isn’t true. They’re quite good with curtains, too. But it is true that the new power that women hold, especially in employment, is dangerous.

Allow me to expand.

  • A chick Doctor in Harrogate lost a false fingernail in a man’s lower intestine, causing his bowel to fall out.
  • A female bus driver in Darlington caused a twelve-car pile-up reading Woman’s Own while negotiating a roundabout. The drivers of the twelve cars hadn’t the time to react, as they were all doing their make-up at the time.
  • A female pilot lost control of a Boeing 747 because she was crying about a hungry cat she’d seen in her garden that morning.
  • A female soldier shot half of her own battalion as she stumbled across hostile terrain wearing stilettos.
  • In France, a bint can kill you if she can prove to the court she was on her dabs.

Sobering stuff.

I hope you don’t think I’ve been chauvinist or misogynistic tonight. This is not misogyny. It’s self-defence. Because although we love women – those deliciously mad, sexually-sociopathic Hell-dogs with tits – we must handle them carefully – like bombs, or rabid ferrets. We must love them like blow-up dolls filled with sixty per cent cotton wool to forty per cent sharp but rusty potato peelers.

Let’s raise a glass to the fairer sex.

Here’s tae ye!