Watch You Crawl

It's official, I have arachnophobia, entomophobia, herpetophobia and microphobia, or at least some mixture of the four.

I've always been pretty scared of spiders... I remember my first week married I was hoovering the house on my day off to give a good impression to my spouse, and a spider about a centimetre long popped out from a pile of shoes in our vestibule.  Although I had the hoover in my hand I just couldn't bring myself to hoover it up, and by and by it because less scared of me than I was of it, so crawled away back into the worst possible thing: one of my furry, brown slippers.  I called up the Don because I didn't really want to leave it alive crawling around but I also didn't really want to do anything about it and so I didn't really know what to do.  But try as I might, even standing one and a half meters away, I couldn't bring myself to tip up the slipper, or move it in any way, to try and get the spider out to suck it up.  I was pretty much in tears at the thought of it coming out (pathetic as it may sound), and in the end left the shoes and hoover as they were till the Don got home.

My fear didn't get any better the following September when the wood spiders decided to also come and enjoy the warmth of our house.  Boy, even the Don had to brace himself before trying to catch those...

I know I'm lucky that we have nothing worse than ants here, but these ants freak me out a little bit too.  I know I know I know they're totally harmless, but every morning we have two or three or sometimes ten in our dishwasher, and often more scurry out of sight as we turn on the light in the kitchen, and they just give me the heeby jeebies every time I see them.  I catch them, I kill them, I teach Toots and Tiger to catch them and kill them, but not once do I see one without a having a shudder.  And when I've felt one crawling on me, as I have a couple of times in the dead of night when I've been up feeding Lightning, it's just eurgh, it's horrible, it really does practically paralyse me.  After I've jumped about like a lunatic trying to get it off me of course.

But last night, last night I decided that I really do have a problem. Yesterday morning as the Don was having a shower he saw something small scurry up and into the bath overflow pipe in our en-suite.  In the evening as we were getting ready for bed he saw a teeny tiny baby gecko, only about 3 or 4cm long, sitting on the edge of the bath, which was probably what he had seen earlier.  It's only the fourth gecko we've seen, and only the second in our house, so they're not generally a problem.  But as he tried to catch it to release it outside, it scurried away into my walk in wardrobe.  Not the tidiest at the best of times, the Don had a struggle trying to locate it amongst my clothes, shoes and boxes of clothes. Valiantly I told him not to bother since I was sure it'd come out again during the night if we left the door open, but thankfully, he didn't listen to a word I said.  Anyway, as he was trying to catch it I felt I had to stay close to lend a hand (ha!) were it required, but at the same time I couldn't help but move closer and closer to the door of the bedroom, away from the thing that could potentially run out and crawl over me.  And I know it's utterly stupid. absolutely pathetic, I totally know that.  I know I'm far bigger than spiders and ants and baby geckos, even daddy geckos, but nevertheless they all totally freak me out.

But I guess that's why it's a phobia.