As the daylight hours are lengthening activity levels rise and so at the weekend my husband decided to tidy the shed so that in sunny periods he could sit there once more. I walked in to admire his efforts and caught sight of one of the biggest native spiders I have ever seen scuttling for shelter from whence it had been displaced.
I experienced two instantaneous reactions and I was surprised to find that I was ashamed of the first - a visceral response to spiders. It was not the manner in which were were brought up.
We were taught to overcome an innate repulsion for 'creepy crawlies'. We were encouraged to pick up worms and feel their bristly movements across our palms. We cupped spiders in our hands. Looping caterpillars dropped on threads from hawthorn twigs and we watched them gyrate towards us. Locusts once came home from the school biology lab to our greenhouse for the summer holidays, stick insects in large sweet jars ate our privet, excreted and reproduced. Twilight moths were captured in Woodbank Park.
This was our heritage, an invertebrate and entomological childhood. When I next come across a spider I may start with fear and curiosity. May curiosity prevail.
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