A Biblical Plague of Spiders

I have no idea where they came from, or how long they're planning to stay, but we have been invaded for the past few summers by herds of pesky daddy long legs spiders. I don't know why they have supplanted the more traditional house spider and why they feel they need to congregate in every corner of every room in our house but they are damn annoying. They don't even have the decency to spin a proper web, instead creating something which can only be described as "a big mess of spider silk" in virtually all corners of the house. We can easily collect and remove five or six on any given day we care to try (and by remove I don't mean carefully catch in a glass and place outside) with only a cursory search, occasionally as many as that per room. But a only few days later we may as well have not bothered. I do wonder if we could reach some sort of natural spider equilibrium where all available room corners have a spider in residence but I suspect they would just start stacking up and down the walls like they do in the garage. Don't get me started on the vast numbers of spiders in the garage!

We have even reversed our usual house spider removal policy in an unfortunately vain attempt to encourage some sort of inter species predation. I would have expected normal house spiders to jump at the chance to eat up a few of their spindly cousins but it seems they don't. Lazy bastards. If we could risk encouraging birds in to eat them up I'd probably be willing to give it a try, but this would begin the inevitable process of getting cats in to eat the birds, then dogs to eat the cats. At that point I'd probably just take the dogs out myself rather than wasting my time with cows and horses. If I'm honest I'm not entirely sure how effective a cow would be at eating a dog anyway. Unless it was a dog made of grass, but then how effective would a grass dog be at eating cats? I think I can guess that the answer to that is "Not very" without actually having to go to the bother of making one. I suppose I could just throw the grass dog repeatedly at the cats until they get the message they're no longer wanted but then I could equally well throw it in the bin myself when all the cats were gone, so I'm pretty sure that bovine intervention would not be required at any point. Which is just as well, imagine the mess they'd make.

Stick, our own in house bird, seems somewhat reluctant to rise to the challenge. Perhaps she's worried about the cats.

The peculiar spider invasion mystery becomes even more puzzling when I ponder what they might be eating. It's not like our house is full of flies like some giant spider supermarket. I mean, fair enough, we do get the occasional fly passing through like anywhere with open windows but as a rule we don't leave little piles of decaying meat and faeces all over the place so we don’t exactly get swarms in. You wouldn't think the few we do get wouldn't be enough to support the vast spider army that is occupying our house but clearly it is. Although now that I think about it I can’t remember any of the thousands of webs we've hoovered up having little mummified fly corpses wrapped up inside them. Could it be that they’re just eating each other?

Perhaps it’s some sort of spidery attempt to force evolve a race of super spiders. This would also explain why the regular spiders leave them so very much alone. Personally I’d probably have started with something a little more impressive but remember, as Darwin pointed out, from humble microbes mighty dinosaurs grow. You've got to admire their strategic thinking.

Yes, I am pretty bored at work today.

A Little Light Scepticism Before Work

I've been using my seemingly endless car journeys round the M25 to listen to the excellent podcast series from the New England Sceptical Society (NESS) called "The Sceptics Guide to the Universe." They've been mostly very interesting although they cover the whole Intelligent Design farrago far too often for my liking. Not that I think there's any validity to ID but they essentially just keep saying the same thing over and over (it's not science) and in my view don't quite go far enough and tar all religious thinking with the same brush. Again I suspect because it's such a hot button issue in the States. Still, I'll let them off, they are American and ID was a big issue in America in 2005 (when the podcast started) as various school boards tried to change the science curriculum to include ID supposedly for balance (but it's not science!) Thankfully they failed in their attempts but it's worrying that something like this happens at all in a supposedly 'advanced' country. It would be funny if it wasn't so serious.



I am slightly concerned that my current bout of grumpiness is induced at least as much by listening to all the ID nonsense in the car as it is by sitting in the traffic. I had hoped to be amused by it all but generally it's just worrying. So I'm going to try and put it all in it's proper context, it's not news after all it's history, the ID people lost. It's not science! Fortunately they've moved onto some more lightweight topics to debunk like spiritualism and alternative medicine. Certainly listening to the excellent Collings and Herrin podcast on the way in today put me in a much better mood.



In any event I'm not sure I've got the stamina to work my way through the entire back catalogue, although I'd like to - I'm currently on 22 out of 250 and each one is around an hour long! By my reckoning I'll need to be at Carpetright for another 77 days to work my way through the current crop, although they'd have produced another 11 in that time, so that would mean... Didn't Achilles and the tortoise do something similar?



Anyway, I won't be here that long, so my consumption of sceptical material should slow down enough for me to safely vent it all out in a controlled manner without the danger of getting too wound up.

Something To Get Your Teeth Into

The mystery of the Screaming Phoebe in the Nighttime has been solved. She's getting some more teeth through! Typically, it's not the set you're supposed to get next (upper incisors) or even the ones after that (upper lateral incisors) she's gone for the more avant-garde lower lateral incisors. Obviously she's not read the same book we have.

It does puzzle me somewhat that getting teeth is so painful and distressing. Well, sometimes, the first pair appeared with virtually no warning at all. I suppose it just goes to show that humans are the way they are due a (very) large chain of mutations and adaptations rather than, say, some big bloke with a white beard decreeing how things are supposed to be. Sorry to all the Deists out there - OK, I'm not sorry, but them's the facts. There's no point getting all upset about it because they will still be the facts regardless of what it says in whatever book you happen to believe in.

A Taxing Question

Tax return completed for another year. Yaaay! Bit of a boring thing to post about I suppose but not every day is exciting.

A strange realisation dawned on me yesterday, as I sat in traffic at the Dartford Crossing once again. I used to be a fairly easygoing sort of guy. I used to queue in traffic without complaint. I used to sit calmly, the light smile of the Pharaohs on my lips in jams of almost any duration. But not any more. It's true I'm inexorably approaching my fortieth birthday, but surely mere age can't explain my transformation. Maybe when I'm fifty*, but not now.

So what is it? The thunderbolt of insight that hit me was the realisation of what the M25 is actually for. I know there are those that would argue that the M25 is for conveying cars round the outskirts of London. But that's clearly wrong. For a start, cars are mainly conveyed up to the rear bumper of the car in front at which point they stop. No, it's a giant machine. A giant machine whose main purpose is to convert normal easygoing people such as myself into grumpy bastards. The only possible explanation for this is that the Government wants to maintain a large pool of angry men (or women) in case they want to raise an army. I'm betting that at least 50% of the people who regularly commute on the M25 are so frustrated they would welcome the chance to lash out at pretty much anyone.

Good job I worked it out.

*Obviously when I actually am fifty I'll have to edit this and put sixty instead. And so on.

Traffic Calming

After sitting in two traffic jams today (car on fire between Chertsey and Guildford in the morning and a broken down lorry on the Dartford Crossing in the evening) I was feeling a little grumpy to find myself coming to a stop again at Junction 8. Three jams in one day is just a bit much. I was grumbling and muttering all the way up the hill until I finally got to the source of the problem and saw, sitting forlornly at the side of the road, a smashed up Ferrari FXX*. Ouch! Suddenly my day didn't seem so bad after all.

*To be honest I'm in no way a Ferrari expert and I didn't exactly get a good look at it. Still, in my head it was an FXX which for the purposes of this blog entry is all that matters. Does the fact that I want it to be the most stupidly expensive Ferrari of all make me a bad person?

Word of the Week

The first in an occasion series.

The made up word of the week is Mentaclop. It means someone who isn't operating at full mental capacity - such as someone who has recently had a baby. Some people of course seem to operate at what I would consider to be well below full mental capacity for no discernible reason.

The origins of this fine word are thanks to my wife, the Lovely Hej who was trying to say "I'm not operating at full mental capacity" but actually said "I'm not a mentaclop." Clearly she said that because she was a mentaclop. Having babies does that to you. Now, I realise that technically this would mean that being mentaclop meant you were operating at full mental capacity, but let's face it being mentaclop doesn't sound like it's a good thing. Besides, it's our word so we can define it how we like.

One of the things I really love about her is that when she's tired she talks complete and utter nonsense. Sometimes she comes up with gems like this. Thanks to the lovely Phoebe, I'm sure there will be a steady supply of new words for some time to come.

In a Roundabout Way

Grrr, it took me an extra 40-odd minutes to get home last night because there was some kind of problem on the other carriage way of the M25. So annoyingly, thanks to some thoughtless fuckwits who were trying to get on to the presumably closed motorway forming a nice solid queue across the roundabout entrance everyone who wanted to go the other way got stuck too. I was starting to get more than a little narked as I sat staring at a gloriously empty slip road that I couldn't get to thanks to some mentaclop in a transit van (amongst others) who just had to get another three feet further down the road. For forty minutes. Forty. Minutes. Forty!

So I'd just like to take this opportunity to say "Thanks guys. Nice of you to share the misery around."

It's Meditation Time

Surprisingly to some perhaps, I'm doing a meditation course. This week it's 'Earth' - not the Earth we live on, but Earth as in Earth, Water, Fire, Air (which will be coming up in subsequent weeks.) I'm enjoying it, it's certainly very relaxing and you can definitely feel some sort of physical response such as tingling and even twitching in all the right places (the place in the body that corresponds to the Earth Element is at the base of your spine/coccyx.)

I can't help feeling a little sceptical about the explanation for what's happening though. I mean, come on, Chi energy and Chakras, it all just a bit (OK a lot) silly. I'm not saying I can explain what is happening but invoking some mysterious force as an explanation in fact explains nothing. It's probably something to do with increased blood flow, nerve stimulation or tiny muscles or fascia that rarely move consciously twitching. It's times like this that I wish I knew a bit more biology.

Still, I am enjoying it!

Unidentified Crying Objects

For what I think is be the first time ever (and I realise that makes me a lot luckier than most new parents but it's little consolation this morning) Phoebe woke up screaming in the night. I'm knackered. Fortunately I'm working from home today, driving half way round the M25 could have been a bit risky considering how sleepy I feel.

Why am I here?

No, not that why am I here, I already know the answer to that. Why am here writing this blog? It's certainly not because I'm desperate to share my innermost thoughts with thousands of attentive readers. I'd be surprised if anybody reads this ever. It's mainly an accident. I was just trying to comment on my brother's beer blog, but the only way I could do it was by creating a blog account. So I thought "Sod it, may as well post a few times now that I'm here."

So there you go. Mystery solved.

Buying a car by accident

Went with the Mrs to test drive a Golf today. Ended up buying it. Not entirely sure how that happened!

Edit: Still reeling a bit. I should point out that we weren't going to test drive a specific Golf, we were just looking at Golfs in general. My excuse is I was very tired.

Fuck off you red nosed bastard!

So this is my first blog entry. Starting a blog after a few beers (well not actual beers obviously, somewhat strangely I've been drinking Wray & Nephew's Roman Catholic Eucharistic Wine) probably isn't the best idea. In fact it's definitely not a good idea, so I'll pause until some measure of self censorship returns - the Catholics drink the good stuff!