I am blogging again at this hideously late time, not because I am hoping to spot The BFG delivering dreams to my neighbours, but because we have had the first (and hopefully last) spider encounter of 2018.
I was happily dozing and about to fully fall asleep, when Claire leapt out of bed – and I mean LEAPT.

Instinctively, I knew the cause of this reaction. A spider. I was right. Before I continue this horror story, I will say that I would be in the wrong to suggest I have some supernatural, psychic power, to enable me to guess when my wife has spotted an arachnid. The truth is, that whenever Claire shouts or lets out a shriek from another room, I always incorrectly assume that she has been attacked by a spider, when in fact the reality is that she has dropped a cup or stubbed her toe on the kitchen table. Therefore, tonight, when Claire took flight and left the marital bed, I correctly guessed it was a spider, when on another evening, she could have smelt an unpleasant odour and thought that I had broken wind.

Back to the spider… the way Claire described the beast, you would have thought it was as big as a dining plate. “Why don’t we ever keep a dustbin in the bedroon?” I thought, thinking that such an object would be the ideal size to catch something with such a large leg diameter. Never mind a dustbin, we didn’t even have a sodding pint glass in the bedroom! Again, I wished to myself – this time that either Claire or myself were alcoholics, who would have a bedside pint glass. No such luck. Never mind being an ‘alcy’, even my cider drinking days are a thing of the past. The only thing that Claire could find, in order to trap the invader to our bedroom, was a plastic disposable cup. The type you get served orange squash in at a church fête. Marvellous.

There was bad news. By the time Claire had FOUND the cup, she had LOST the spider. If you hate spiders, like I do, a spider missing in the bedroom is the thing of nightmares. Seriously – I’d rather dream of being buried alive by Fred West or eaten by a baboon. Luckily, my hero wife pulled apart our TV cabinet, accidentally unplugging the Sky box in the process, and found the creature responsible for causing so much peril.
Once caught in the barley water cup, Claire took the spider to the bathroom for disposal – out of the window, not down the toilet, before any of you call the RSPCA.

Needless to say, I didn’t ask to see the spider. I wanted it out of the house, quicker than Donald Trump would deport a gay, disabled, unemployed immigrant, without a visa.
I was on the verge of sleep, before the ordeal. Now, to quote Claire, “Well, if I was sleepy before, I f***ing ain’t now!”

Anyway, sleepy or not, I am off to try and rest. I just hope that “thing” didn’t have any friends. As they say on Crimewatch, “Don’t have nightmares”.