Eight-Legged Bastards

Following on from my complaints last time that nowadays no affliction is taken seriously until it has been suffered by a celebrity, I sincerely hope that arachnophobia will finally be given the respect it deserves, following Charlie Brooker's admission of suffering from it on Twitter yesterday. To cut a long story short, he had the misfortune to see a large spider crawling up his living room curtains. To make matters worse, he was wearing no shoes and had to resort to standing on his sofa, attempting to defend himself with an umbrella. Now, a a fellow arachnophobe, I have great sympathy with his predicament. Many is the time I've found myself trapped in a room by a bastard spider lurking near the only exit - and it's true, the evil little bastards only ever appear when you don't have your shoes on, thereby depriving you of your most potent anti-spider defence: the hard stamp. Even if you can't flatten the thing, you can make it run with this manoeuvre.

Over the years I've employed many anti-spider strategies. I used to have a fairly powerful repeating air pistol, (now sadly illegal in the UK and long since disposed of), and dispatched quite a few of them with that. The disadvantages of this method was that my poor aim took its toll on my plaster work when the gits tried to escape by running up the walls. I eventually gave up using the air pistol after I failed to get a spider on my bathroom ceiling, despite firing six shots at it - it took a lot of work to cover up the bullet marks left in the plaster. My currently favoured method is the improvised hand-held flame thrower. OK, it's actually an aerosol can and a lighter. I was inspired to use this by that bit in Live and Let Die, where Roger Moore fries that snake by igniting his hairspray with a cigar. I saw it as a kid and was deeply impressed. Anyway, this approach has the advantage of not requiring such a good aim as the gun - the flame produced by an ignited aerosol covers a pretty big area. The disadvantage, obviously, is that you have to get closer to the spider for it to be effective. And, of course, you have to always have a lighter handy, even if, like me, you don't smoke.

Then there's the potential for collateral damage. I mean if, for instance, the spider you were destroying was crawling up your curtains, (as in Charlie Brooker's case), at the very least you'd burn a whole in them with the flamethrower. More likely, you'd set them ablaze. Personally, I have blinds - in the mistaken belief that spiders are less likely to crawl up them than they are curtains - and I've melted a few in the course of my war against the arachnids. Then there's the personal risk - there was that time I had to leap out of the bath and defend myself against a marauding spider in the bathroom, resulting in singed pubes. So, whilst the flamethrower is highly effective against the spiders, it does carry the risk of resulting in your house burning down. However, I think that's a risk worth taking to ensure that the eight-legged bastards are dead.