I really like autumn, in fact it’s probably my favourite season of the year, but the one thing that I really dislike about it is the spiders. They all start to come into the house about now, I know that loads of people have the same problem too. I’m not keen on spiders – no matter what size they are but at the moment they are humungous. And they always come out at night and gallop towards me. In fact I discovered that they didn’t like going over the flokati (I know, how 1970s of me) rug in the hall so I got a bigger one for the living-room because I was fed up being terrorised by spiders which always seemed to come from behind the TV corner and aim straight for me. The shaggy flokati wool certainly slows them down.

Today I had a horrible spider experience which I suppose I would have tweeted about if I were on twitter but I’m not – so here I go!

I went out to the garden to get some rosemary for the Sunday roast, and to reach it I had to put one foot into the herb patch. A couple of minutes after I put the roast in the oven I was aware that there was something in my hair. I thought it would be the usual bit of garden which had fallen on me. I put my hand up expecting to find a leaf there, I looked at my hand thinking ‘ How the hell did a bunch of brown leaves get into my hair’ – then they shot out of my hand and disappeared under the furniture, never to be seen again! Well not so far anyway, no doubt that huge spider will come back to haunt me.

I think it must have crawled or jumped on to me when I had my foot in the herb patch! That’s the closest encounter that I’ve had with any of those spiders but at least it all happened so quickly that it was gone before I could scream. The same can’t be said of the time that I saw out of the corner of my eye, whilst I was reading in bed, a huge spider gallumphing across the duvet. I didn’t scream once when I was in labour with my kids despite the fact that it was so awful that if I had had a gun I would have shot myself – but I certainly screamed when I saw that spider!