Let's start with the basics. You are in the comfort of your own home, with the TV tuned to a cartoon channel with no sound, the CD player blasting some suitably depressing tunes (Bauhaus, Tom Waits, Joy Division...) and you are enjoying a cup of your favourite coffee. You may be chatting on the phone to a friend about the merit of chocolate cake vs. carrot cake, or reading a vampire novel by some obscure 18th century author.
In an ideal world, you'd also have a couple of cats - preferably black ones - strolling about the place and lending the whole flat some elegance and poise.
'Death' is the predominant theme creating this ambiance, but it is decadent Death, where black, mourning, and bloodsucking creatures of the night may prevail, but only as an accompaniment to cakes and Lazy Sunday coffee - and with a total absence of creeping, crawling things, or things actually rotting.
In this idyllic setting, your eyes suddenly pick up something wrong just at the corner of your vision, you snap your head suddenly and there it is: THE BEAST!!!!
Suddenly your home is not yours anymore, it has been invaded by an alien presence more foul than the darkest demon and more utterly terrifying than reading 'starring Julia Roberts' in a movie opening credits.
You panic, you start to shiver, you are frozen to the spot, your eyes rooted to the creature, unable to let go for fear it may move and then you won't know where it is anymore and it could be in your coffee.
You start to back out of the room, slowly, trembling, thinking desperately of how to cope with this situation. Emigrate to yet another country? Blast a small atomic bomb in your flat? Perform an exorcism? Then, just when you think it cannot get any worse, the things moves!!! The sudden eight-legged movement makes your stomach churn as if your intestines were inside a tumble-dryer. In a few seconds the creature has scuttled behind the sofa. You know that you will need to move the sofa to see where it has gone, and you are still frantically thinking of a way of ridding yourself of the beast. You shakily go closer to the sofa, clutching a chemical/ biological weapon similar to the ones possessed by Saddam Hussein (an aerosol can of "RAID!"), your eyes darting in all directions, trying to see where the creature is.
The only thing between you and the ARACHNID OF DOOM is a small, Ikea sofabed.
Suddenly, a black shape emerges from behind the sofa and runs towards you at warp speed 8. Like a rabbit caught in the headlights, you are unable to move…you aim your can of "RAID!" at its head, and fire a mighty blast of the foul smelling chemical. The spider is caught in the blast. It reels. It's eight legs twitch uncontrollably. It dies. You have killed a creature. Death is now in your apartment for real, not just in the boxed set of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' series two.
Need I go on?? Shall I also mention finding spiders in your bathroom, in your bedroom, hidden among your clothes, behind your favourite books, in the kitchen cupboard next to the only food left in the house, standing in the middle of a web right in front of your face when you open your front door… the list is endless and the amount of emotional and mental agony produced by such encounters is enough to drive anybody mad.
Let's add some scientific facts about spiders:
Spiders have a pair of clasping mouthparts, one could say fangs, known as chelicerae. They use these to grasp prey and to inject poison thus enabling them to disable large insects which otherwise would be a bit of a handful. The poisons are neurotoxins which don't actually kill the prey; they just paralyse them. They can thus be wrapped in silk and kept to be eaten at a later time. To bite into an insect, spiders have to get through the exoskeleton made of chitin. If they can bite through that, most should have little problem with human skin. In fact we find that even tiny money spiders, which we encounter often in late summer and autumn, can cause irritating itching with their bites.
Now there are many kinds of spiders to be found in houses. But the animals normally referred to as house spiders belong to the genus Tegenaria. There are about 10 different species of Tegenaria to be found in Europe; the largest of these, Tegenaria gigantea can be as much as 13 cm across counting the legs. There is little doubt that they can bite if cornered. Many of these house spiders have been spread around the world by man's activities and one of them, Tegenaria agrestis, has become a bit of problem in the USA. Known there as the Hobo spider or Aggressive House Spider, it is a spider to be avoided. It can and does bite and the poison can cause dizziness and headaches.
In addition, it causes necrosis of the tissue near the bite, which may lead to the need for surgical treatment. It does not prove to be a problem in Europe because here it lives outdoors and is rarely encountered. We don't hear of the others causing any problems. But we can put this down, not to their inability to bite us, but to their retiring habits, which cause them to flee instead of attacking. As for the deadliness of the poison, the European Black Widow spider, Latrodectus mactans, remains the one most to be feared.
Another interesting fact is that apparently the average person ''eats'' up to 4 spiders in their sleep during their lifetime (even vegetarians).
It is obvious that spiders are evil. Forget hell as a lake of flames, that it nothing compared to a cave full of spiders. But surely god can't be that vindictive, can (s)he????
