The Little World

Is fear itself. And the spiders that live under the bench.

I am writing this from Perth in Western Australia. If you are reading it in Canada, the USA, the UK, or anywhere else in Europe or Asia, you will know that the whole continent is populated with venomous animals. Whether it is ladybugs, sheep, or Blue Wrens, everything here is armed with long poisonous fangs and leaps out at you from the undergrowth.

This accounts for the Australian habit of playing a blowtorch in their shoes in the morning before putting them on, and then removing the dead snakes. And throwing a Mills bomb into the pan of the outside toilet before doing the daily visit. And don’t even ask about the business of looking under the bed, because you will not sleep for a week.

We take it in our stride, or strides, in the case of people who leave them hanging in the locker at the cricket club. We’re used to it. It isn’t summer without a fatality. This my casual attitude to the spiders under the workbench.

They are not good spiders – not good, efficient, neat, artistic spiders. There is no neat web making with them. No Charlotte. No whimsy. These are spiders who do not need to rely upon being a cartoon, unless it’s possibly drawn by Charles Addams. These are Redbacks.

I’m grateful that they are. Grateful that they are the venomous antipodean version of the Black Widow. Grateful that they are lazy spiders, overconfident – full of poison and thuggish attitude. Spiders that never get out of the way for anyone. Because that makes them easy to kill.

I used to think that this needed powerful poison, fierce flames, and steel clubs. Nothing of the sort. They are so slow and stupid that you can dispatch them with a flyswat or a shoe. I do the occasional Mortein spray under there just before I commit my bare summer legs under the bench, but that is more to flush them out, coughing, so that the Shoe Of Doom can do its work.

I am also grateful that they aren’t the Sydney funnel-web trap door laser-powered spider nightmares that really do jump out at people. They are in New South Wales and from what I have seen of some of the residents of Rockdale, deservedly so. I should not dream of interfering with their natural hunting activities…