Spiders are my biggest fear | Steve Canavan

I won’t bore you about the washing up as I have written about it several times before.

In a nutshell Mrs Canavan appears to believe not only that dirty pots mysteriously wash themselves but even more amazingly that they somehow get transported from wherever she’s left them – usually the lounge windowsill, by the couch where she watches TV – back into the kitchen.

Why, it’s almost as if someone is doing it all for her.

It’s either a little magic washing up elf, or me.

I’ll let you decide.

The other bone of contention, on which I’ll focus here, is, as I mentioned, spiders.

We both detest them, me slightly more so.

I’ve had this lifelong fear due to having a mother who, whenever she spotted a spider minding its own business, wandering happily around the lounge wall, would scream as if being attacked by an armed intruder and sprint from the room, shouting: ‘Run for you life, NOW, before it’s too late’.

It instilled in me an irrational fear of arachnids too.

I’ll never forget the look of utter shame in my father’s eyes when, during a car journey, I went to adjust the rear view mirror and a spider dropped on my lap.

I shrieked, slammed on the brakes, pretty much jumped out of a moving vehicle (fortunately we were in slow-moving traffic on a minor road as opposed to the fast lane of the M1), and wouldn’t get back in until my dad got rid of it.

Our relationship was never quite the same again.

I’m not sure why I have this grave fear of the little blighters.

After all I am around a million times larger than your average spider so that should, you’d think, give me the upper hand in a conflict (though that said, they have way more legs so might kick me to death).

Whatever, I can’t help it – I simply don’t like them.

And the reason they provoke argument in the Canavan household is the way we get rid of them.

Mrs C – a nature lover who believes in goodwill and kindness to all animals – will very carefully approach the spider with a glass in hand, put said glass over it, slide a piece of paper underneath, and then delicately take our eight-legged friend outside and place it into the garden – usually accompanied by me squealing ‘not there, it’ll come back in, go further way from house’ and then frogmarching Mrs Canavan and the glass down the road until I’m satisfied we’ve gone a safe distance, usually about four miles away.

When she isn’t there to do the deed, though, I have to take matters into my own hands and it’s fair to say my approach is very different.

If I see a spider – no matter how small or insignificant it may be – I will pick up a shoe (a Doc Marten boot is best, certainly nothing flimsy like a plimsol or flip-flop) and then smash the cretin so hard its bodily juices splatter over a two-metre radius of wallpaper.

I grant you it isn’t the most humane way of getting a spider out of one’s property, but it is highly effective.

Before any animal lovers get too het up about this, let me say that all letters of complaint should be sent to my mother, who taught me this method of spider disposal.

My mum is an absolute serial killer when it comes to spiders. Her chosen method of assassination is by whacking it with a shoe, and she still fondly reminisces about the autumn of 1956 when she killed four with one single swish of a stiletto.

What you shouldn’t do if you’re afraid of spiders is go on the internet and look for facts about them.

Do you know, for instance, that in one acre of land there will be between one and three million spiders? I discovered this on Monday and haven’t slept since.

Indeed in a recent study of an undisturbed grass field in Sussex, it was discovered there were 5.5m spiders per hectare.

The only place this terrifying spider saturation isn’t the case is in Antarctica, the only continent in which arachnids aren’t found.

I suggested to Mrs Canavan that we move there, but we’ve two young children and she says it’s difficult to get childcare there and the bus service is dreadful.

Most spiders have eight eyes – so they can watch your every move, ready to pounce – and they eat loads, gobbling down hundreds of small flies a day.

I almost needed counselling after reading all this and so went on a website called Facing Your Fear of Spiders, to see how they suggested I overcome my fear.

The first tip was, and I quote, ‘Expose yourself to spiders’. Aside from sounding a little rude (on the street I grew up there was a slightly odd bloke in a long brown mac who did a little too much of that and got a suspended prison sentence), it is being exposed to spiders that is the problem in the first place.

Tip number two was ‘Hold a toy spider’.

Tip five was ‘Go and see a therapist’.

I stopped reading the website shortly after – it was clearly written by imbeciles.

I will endeavour to get over my problem and to begin to treat our spidery friends a little more humanely.

Till then they’d better not set foot in my abode. It is likely to end messily. You have been warned.