Spiders

Ok, so what's the deal with all the spiders here? Snails and slugs I can understand due to the damp, but spiders? How did the UK end up with so many damn spiders?

You'll have to excuse me; we have house guests arriving in a few days and we've been on a marathon cleaning and reorganization rampage (hey, we've only been in this house 1.5 years, so of course the guest room is still full of boxes). And part of this has been scouring the house for spider webs and brushing or vacuuming them away. And they're simply everywhere.

Now, it's not like we haven't cleaned in that 1.5 years; in fact, web-duty is a reasonably common cleaning process around here. But somehow we're always outpaced by the spiders. They seem to manage to continuously create more webs than we can keep up with. So you'll understand my consternation from having a sore back from running the vacuum wand along the ceiling corners to suck down all the webs.

Conventional wisdom would say that we have a lot of spiders because there must be a lot of food for them to eat. While that must be part of it, I don't believe that this is the whole story. Every house we've been in here has been awash with spiders, and there never seemed to be any consistent local conditions (besides being in the UK) to explain it.

And man! Some of these things are disturbing. The ones I'm particularly thinking of are a little bigger than a poker chip across, with stout bodies and legs. And they can run! I mean really book! You think you're going to give one a good gishing and suddenly it charges (yes, charges!) between your feet, and you just about leap out of your socks trying to stay out of its way. I'm told they're harmless, but I'm betting they probably carry guns. Or at least a knife.

I thought this was the beneign land of Miss Tiggywinkle.