Sometimes living on the edge of a forest can bring unwelcome guests. This little beauty decided to escape the bonkers heatwave and chill out in my air conditioned lounge for a while.
Now I have a terrible fear of spiders. I tried to conquer it by going to a course provided by London Zoo in which we were treated to hypnosis and flooding techniques to help us to become friends with these 8 legged bastards.
At the end of the day I had managed the following:
Not bad, but I'm not actually scared of tarantulas. They don't really fall into the spider category in my book. They're more of a rodent. What really makes my skin scrawl are those big old house spiders you get in England. The ones you find sitting in the bath.
So imagine my joy when I saw this mofo perched in the corner of my room last night...
Now, being a vegetarian and all round animal lover, I didn't want to give it a shoeing but rather do what we were taught on the course and to put a glass over it and remove it safely. Unfortunately there wasn't a glass big enough for this beast. It was also situated in the corner of the ceiling, meaning that it was almost impossible to perform my practiced maneuver. So I sat and watched and waited.
After 15 minutes I decided to be proactive and use the broom to nudge it to a more reasonable location. Well, one centimetre from it's body, it sprinted across the wall and I lost my mind.
I took a baseball-like swing at it with the broom but it caused no obvious injury. After two swings and a thorough spraying with mosquito repellent, there was no change to this monster's determination to scare the crap out of me. But luckily, by this time, it was scuttling along the floor.
Got it! A we had a picture for posterity. The next task was to heave it over the balcony where I clearly heard a thud as it hit the ground two storeys below.
Turns out, this is a fantastically poisonous little critter. One I hope has no homing instinct. But I now sleep with a gun under my pillow.
