Ever walked under a tree, or between a couple of houses, and had a spider’s web draped across your face or hair? To me it’s a similar feeling to finding a hair in your food, but only once it’s in your mouth. My ‘go to’ reaction in either circumstance is “Aargh! Bleurgh! Get it away from me! Yuck yuck yuck!”

So as you can see, I handle it like a man.

But it got me thinking about these invisible tickling threads of stress and anguish. Well, actually it got me thinking about a couple of things.

1. What were they trying to achieve?
2. How did they get it across such an expanse?

So lets look at number 1.

I know the purpose of a spider’s web (or cobweb…although I’ve no idea what a cob is) is to catch unwitting flies and bugs for dinner. This in itself must be difficult as a fly’s eyes are huge and therefore they must see the webs…or they’re incredibly dumb in which case they had it coming. A web is usually quite intricately designed with dense patterns and very little room for their bug-eyed prey to fly through them or wriggle free. So why have all these random long strings spanning alleyways and our garden gate?

Then it struck me. They’re trying to catch ME! But why? Am I the arachnid equivalent of matching 6 numbers on a Saturday night? Will there be little spider news reporters talking to my captor asking “so now that you’ll never have to worry about feeding your family again, what will you do?”, to which he’ll reply “it won’t change me”. Is it a revenge thing for evicting his uncle last week or sucking his mate up the Dyson?

Whatever the motive, trying to garrotte me with a thin strand of something as strong as candy floss isn’t the way forward. Whenever I’ve walked through his trap and walk away doing my “Aargh, Bleurgh! etc…” He’s sat there, stroking the spider equivalent of a white cat and saying “next time…next time”. Or maybe he walks away deflated like Wile.E.Coyote after another thwarted plan to catch the road runner, complete with the ‘wah wah waaaaah’ played on a horn.

And what about number 2? (snigger).

The average house spider is about the size of a 50p coin (although they do get bigger…which is just plain wrong), so how the hell do they shoot their web at such a distance? When I was at school many MANY years ago I remember having pissing contests with my friends to see who could get it the furthest. In order to equal what the spiders are doing I would’ve had to produce a stream that would clear the school…and the teacher’s car park (cos I wouldn’t want to get in trouble now would I??). That’s some serious pissing power and no-one could do that, except maybe one of my friends who freakishly was able to get it over the toilet door and into the toilet. Legendary.

But this would be some serious distance! How the hell do they get those arcing white ropes of bum jizz so far? Not even Peter North could do that! (Don’t know who he is? Porn star. Look him up). Are they doing it as a team? Are there arachnid builders complete with scaffolding and blueprints? Did I destroy it before its finished?

I feel a bit guilty now.

I think tomorrow I’ll thrash around a bit and make them feel better. It’s the least I can do for ridding my house of those dumbass flies.