Then someone comes to visit with a tray of salted chocolate peppermint squares and things don’t seem so bad.
It’s always nice to have visitors, unless of course you’re in the middle of something important. But I stopped doing important things years ago, so now I can relish my time with visitors, particularly when they bring news of the outside the world, or a plate of salted chocolate peppermint squares.
Anyway, my latest visitor dropped by about three weeks ago, and she hasn’t outlasted her welcome yet.
I first noticed her when I heard the swimming pool top-up system running.
I lifted the ground cover and there she was sitting on the ball of the float valve looking terrifyingly beautiful with eight hairy splayed legs, and a big orange-striped brown head.
My spider knowledge has always been limited because of an embarrassingly primitive fear I have inherited from my cave-dwelling uncles, whose beds were no doubt crawling with them.
Consequently, I can’t look at a spider without experiencing an electric shiver down the spine.
I deduced my visitor was female because she was sitting on a grey-white blob which looked like an egg sac.
If I moved to touch the ball, she scuttled instantly to the under-side of the sphere, which was underwater.
Because I have nothing more important to do in life other than remain curious, I sat down out of spider eyesight and waited.
Sure enough, after a good five minutes, she scuttled back to the top of the ball.
I was now her friend, so I went away to find out more about her and her kind.
She’s an Australian wolf spider from the family lycosidae and thankfully, she’s no threat to humans.
But here’s the best bit — she has eight eyes arranged in three rows — four small eyes in front, two large eyes in the middle and two medium-sized eyes in the top row.
That’s remarkable enough — but things are about to get even more incredible.
When her spiderlings hatch, she will carry them around on her back for about two weeks until they either rise up and float away like a balloon, or they scatter in every direction on the ground.
I don’t plan to be around when that happens.
Apparently, this extended mamma care is pretty unusual in spiders, so in purely human terms she is to be admired and respected.
I think Mr Musk should give her a special salute.
When I went back to look at her the next day, I lifted the valve cover and there she was — still perched on her ball.
This tennis ball-sized sphere perched in a small, waterlogged underground hole was her entire universe.
It could have been Guantanamo Bay or Gaza, but she made the most of it.
I visited her every day for the next fortnight, and nothing changed in her world except the circle of the sun.
How or what she ate, I don’t know. One day, I looked under the cover, and she was gone.
I hope her maternal dedication paid off and her spiderlings are all floating free and happy in the big, bright world.
Her persistence reminded me of a story from my childhood of Scottish king Robert the Bruce hiding in a cave and watching a spider trying to spin its web.
Each time the web broke, the spider started again.
Inspired by the spider, Bruce went on fighting the English, eventually defeating them at Bannockburn in 1314.
Moral: Keep trying — you only really fail when you stop trying.
And keep on waiting for another salted chocolate peppermint square day.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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