Important: No spiders were harmed during the writing of this post.

Everyone and their aunt, and uncles, grandparents and great-grandparents, and their neighbors and acquaintances too probably, know about me and the spiders. It all became public knowledge when I, in my innocence, revealed all in one of my earliest blogs, writing about my encounter with a particularly large specimen. Operation Spider was the first, and if that was not enough, I followed it up with another of those chance meetings, A Spider, Bags and Blogs.

That is how, my dear readers, the stage was set.

What stage, the readers ask at this point, all bewildered. Or may be they haven’t, but I’ll assume they have for the purposes of this post.

Ever since my careless and inadvertent admission to being scared of arachnids, and every other creepy crawly you can think of so to speak… What? It’s not a crime you know to be mortally afraid of creepy crawlies! If you are brave enough, good for you. I tip my non-existent hat in appreciation of your brave self, but no sneering at my fearful self! Just not done. Anyway, getting back, ever since, some good friends, so-called friends may I add, have taken it upon themselves to post news and pictures of spiders on my Facebook wall at regular intervals. *shudder*

My instant reaction on seeing their contributions to my reading and viewing pleasure is to go aaaaaaaaaaaargh!!! More like AAAAAAAAAARGH!!! They, as likely as not, hear it in Timbuktu. In fact, I got an unofficial intimation that they, the Timbuctians (I just made that up, people of Timbuctu are the Tuaregs), are organizing themselves against this frequent onslaught on their collective eardrums. They might even take it up with the UN, I hear. Who can blame them? If and when they find the origin of their disturbance, i.e. me, I shall, without any qualms whatsoever, point my fingers at the real culprits, my friends, er… I mean the so-called friends.

The second reaction is gnashing of teeth (Thank you Wodehouse!), the already capped molars. Let me get my hands on them, I think darkly, these so-called friends. When I do, I’ll make mincemeat of them. Ha! What do they mean defacing my Facebook wall with spiders? SPIDERS!!!! Grrr….. But these guys, and you know it is only guys who do these sort of things, the gals are too sweet to me, stay too far away, out of reach of the long arms of law… Sorry, I rather got carried away there, I actually meant my very short and plump hands which cannot even reach the top shelf in the kitchen. Sigh.

Anyways…

Gnashing of teeth ends only in draining my pockets and making my dentist richer I have found out, much to my chagrin. So I try and catch myself in the nick of time and instead knit my eyebrows for all they are worth. Not that the guys can see me. I tried to remedy that by once posting a picture of mine with eye-brows knit as much as they could be knitted without them crashing into each other and creating one long eyebrow in all. To scare them, but of course. The result I got wanted me to burst into tears for the wasted effort. ‘You look so cute! Haha!’ they said.

Spiders on trees, spiders on walls, raining spiders, spiders that roll themselves into woolly balls enticing clueless and foolish (I might fall into that category having once caught a resting lizard by it’s tail) humans to pick them up, white spiders, green spiders, black, gray and brown spiders, harmless spiders, poisonous spiders, cartoons of spiders sitting on walls talking to the room’s occupant (presumably me), I have seen them all. So much so that I now first peep carefully through the fingers of my hands covering my face to make sure my wall is spider-free.

Recently one of the guys was even urging me to talk to them. The spiders I mean, not the guys. Apparently that would make us understand each other better. Like hell I want to have any form of communication with them! My policy when it comes to spiders is the same as the policy with the rest of the creepy crawlies, who seem to make a beeline for me as soon as they see me on the horizon. You take the high road and I’ll take the low one, or vice versa, but let’s not meet. Ever. One of the soundest policies, don’t you think? Or perhaps you don’t think so. Sigh. Never mind.

© Shail Mohan 2019

Taking a one off break from writing about my Russian tour because I couldn’t resist the prompt for today at Fandango’s: Spider, a word I couldn’t do justice to by fitting it into one of the travelogues. 🙂