Arachne

October, and in spite of a few climatic irregularities, now is the season of dragons’ breath mists and fruitful mellowness, as nature’s palette changes, the bees fall silent, the birds rearrange their harmonies, and an everywhere swaddle and swathe of silk heralds the mating season of the spider. Indoors and out, small man spiders, who seldom survive the winter, desperately seek dinner dates with big lady spiders. Ladies for whom they will perform hypnotic dances, to whom they will tentatively proffer gifts, and then (should they get lucky) after, and occasionally during their spidery nooky, they will become the Dish of the Day. 

Hardly surprising then that they should play a significant part in our Halloween horrorfest. The most common of human phobias, it has been proposed that arachnophobia may even linger in our DNA, since deadly spiders presented an ever-present threat to our African ancestors. Spiders, meanwhile, are apparently fearful of everything and they hate the smells of basil, peppermint, lemon, vinegar, cinnamon - and conkers! However, I recently read that they (and mosquitoes) are apparently enthralled by the smell of sweaty socks.

Sacred to the Celts; the source of creation and protection to Native Americans; and the bringers of order from chaos to the Hindus, spiders are respected in most cultures, and it is considered bad luck by most to kill them. In Japan they represent luck and fertility, whilst in Egypt they were even placed into the nuptial beds, and in some parts of Bengal, small spiders are still thrown at newlyweds as fortune confetti. In mythology, spiders were believed to connect the natural world to the realms of spirit. In most ancient cultures they symbolised wisdom, diligence, destiny and good fortune. Arachne, a skilful lady weaver, was turned forever into a spider for daring to gossip about the gods; in Egypt, the goddess Neith, protector of the home, daily wove the destiny of the whole world on her loom; and in today’s world, we are all caught up in a worldwide web. 

Having successfully dated since long before the relatively flimsy dinosaurs, there are more than 50,000 known species of arachnid on Earth, a mere 650 of which live in the UK, whilst there are none at all in Antarctica. The largest, the Goliath, weighing in at six ounces with a hairy leg span of almost a foot, fortunately lives far away in South America. Most of our lot are small and secretive. All have 48 knees on their eight hairy legs - fancy hairs that pick up on vibrations and scents. Most have eight unblinkable eyes, but rubbish eyesight, this compensated by great hearing, smell and touch. Having no teeth, they have to liquidise their food, thereby globally consuming more insects than all the birds and bats on earth combined. 

The average house harbours forty resident spiders. Older houses like my own will host hundreds, in all the nooks and crannies. Their lifespans vary from one to forty years old, so some become domestic familiars. Boris is a sizeable specimen who regularly scurries the same route across my living room around an hour after dusk. His species ( formally The Giant House Spider) have been dubbed rally spiders, known to clock half a metre a second when required, especially when they spot a female. ( Interestingly, the females don’t eat these blokes until after they die of natural causes.) Shelob is a cellar spider who has lived for as long as I can remember above the kitchen plates, under the baking products shelf. Absurdly spindly and gangly, she is static until disturbed, whereupon she starts to vibrate like mad whenever I greet her and reach for a plate. It’s hard to believe that she has ever eaten, but I trust that it is she that keeps my flour free from invaders. There is occasionally a spider in the bath, but less so since I installed a small rope ladder. They say that less than 5% of house spiders have ever been outside, where most of them would die. My mother would have been mortified to learn this, having so bravely captured so many to kindly pop them outside.

All spiders have blue blood, and all spiders produce silk from their bottoms. Spider silk, a hardened but elastic liquid protein, is five times stronger than steel, only the teeth of limpets being stronger. They make up to seven types of silk all with different properties - some is for web construction, some to wrap prey, some to wrap eggs, and some for circus acts and flying on the breeze. They have been found as high as 4km in the sky, using electro-magnetic fields. They can spin a tidy web at a space station, and when plied with LSD, they spin perfect webs, but on caffeine it all falls apart.

We call abandoned webs cobwebs, and they feature in every good horror film. Hummingbirds and long-tailed tits use cobwebs in their nest building, for their strength and elasticity. Years ago, when walking in the yonders, we came across a young cow caught on a length of barbed wire, bleeding profusely from her belly. We ran for help at the nearest farm, and whilst his wife called the vet, the farmer followed us back across the fields to the distressed animal. He glanced briefly at her and then absurdly raced off in another direction to an old shed in the corner of the field. He soon returned, not with a shotgun, but with an armful of grubby cobwebs, which he promptly stuffed into the wound as we lifted her from the cruel wire, before he returned for more. The bleeding stopped rapidly, apparently on account of the Vitamin K content, that together with the webbing, acts as an anticoagulant plaster - an old first-aid manoeuvre apparently well-known by Greek and Roman warriors.

My grandmother would squeal and break into hysterical Welsh mantras at the very mention of a spider, much to my amusement. Always fascinated by them, and observing their ways, I have nursed no fear. In our home, my mother always ‘dealt’ with them, with the glass & card method, or even the handkerchief grab & shake. My warrior father was just the spotter, who was then too busy elsewhere to deal with them.

When my mother finally passed away after a lengthy and gruelling appropriation by dementia, my poor father was too drained and exhausted by events to be able to engage with his feelings. He plodded through the ensuing days trying to connect with something of his former self - not least the devoted husband of sixty years. It was summertime, and he took to sitting outside, dozing in the sunshine. But one day I saw him on the small patio staring intently into a corner for an entire afternoon. The next day he was in the same place. On the third day, he was outside awhile when I heard a long deep wail. He was over in the corner, where I reached out and held him close as his old body writhed with long suppressed grief and misery. As he gained some control, he pointed at the corner, and between sobs expressed his apologies to a rosebush. 

Later, clutching a mug of tea, he explained that for the past days he had, for the first time, been watching a garden spider spinning her web, and hiding under a leaf with her foot on the tripwire, catching flies and bundling them up, and repairing her web again and again, and how the meditation of watching her had helped him to calm down and accept things. But this morning, in order to see her better, he had shifted a potted plant, unaware that it had provided part of the critical anchorage of the web, which promptly collapsed. That was what had finally broken the mighty dam that had held him together the past few years.

Later that day we spoke of the spider, and he admitted he was never too keen on them, which was why my mother had always dealt with their evictions. Then he told me that because she had inherited her mother’s extreme fear of them, she didn’t want to pass it on to me, so she had learned to control her fears in front of me, and resolved to become a spider savior instead. Then it was my turn to weep.