Spiders

I have been irrationally terrified of spiders since a very young age. People say that it’s stupid to feel fear from something so tiny or that they are more afraid of me than I of them but that’s not true. If they were wire my brain and the spider’s brain up to some kind of complex scientific fear calculation device I would bet everything I own that my levels of anxiety would be through the roof whereas the spider might be just slightly concerned that he is locked in a room with a clearly psychotic giant woman screaming and swishing a rolled up newspaper around like a pirate’s sword.
Living in Belfast did nothing to ease my spider phobia, as everyone knows that
Belfast has the highest population of the biggest, scariest, hairiest spiders this side of the rain forest. When I was a young journalist people would often arrive at the newspaper office with mammoth spiders they had caught in their houses for me to view and write stories about. They often contained these beasts in poorly constructed receptacles – flimsy cigarette boxes, lunchboxes with holes in them, used tissues – and after we captured them on film they would escape through the office to haunt me another day.
They say these fears and phobias are passed down from our parents, something I doubt – my own mother would frequently lift mammoth spiders and put them outside without so much as a flicker of fear. Nevertheless I don’t want my boys to fear spiders just because I’m insane so I try and tone the craziness down.
When I see a spider these days I take a deep breath instead of screaming, I project an exterior expression of calmness when every molecule in my body is urging me to fashion a flamethrower from a tin of air freshener and a lighter and annihilate the eight-legged monster.
The last house we lived in, in Belfast, backed onto a waste ground where, I’m just guessing here, at some stage a nuclear bomb went off and affected the DNA of the local spiders a la Godzilla. They were so big we actually heard them click clacking their way across the wooden floor. I swear they were intelligent too, always hiding in the curtains and under duvets.
When we moved from Belfast to Derry a few years back we brought some friends of the hairy-legged monster variety to our new house. The husband was tasked to get rid of them and I was confident he did.
Last weekend we decided it was time to clear out the garage and dump a lot of stuff we don’t need. We happened across a big box that hadn’t been opened since the move and I ripped it open to find a scene from that Arachnophobia film – horrible, thick and indestructible webs and an army of gigantic spiders with big sharp teeth and really irritated expressions (the last bits I may have imagined).
I placed the box on the floor and asked my two boys, who were helping me, to go and ask Daddy if he would please join us in the garage for a calm discussion about our little friends and their situation with regards their future.
After much discussion the city council rubbish dump was chosen as the next port of call. The husband’s previous attempts at eradicating wasps nests with floral disinfectant and a spade (don’t ask) resulted in swarms of really angry, sweet smelling wasps with sore heads. He has since been taken off all pest control duties so we left it to the nice man at the dump (the incinerator).
The box of spiders was loaded up and the kids were told they were off to live in the countryside were they could enjoy hours of fresh air, sunshine and freedom to spin webs where they liked without the fear of rolled up newspapers hanging over them, just like the extended family of mice we found last week.