A fresh start

Hmm.

Not a good start to the day. Wakened at about 5.30 am by restless dog was unable to go back to sleep. Didn't have a book to hand, and it was much too early to call anyone, so sat here, in the chair, and listened to the wireless. My usual night-time listening is Talk Sport Radio, I love the fact that there are lunatics awake and frothing at the mouth in the early hours, but as it approaches 6 am, it's time for the talk to stop, and the sport to begin. During the week, the sport is inevitably something rough and sweaty, ie. football, but at the weekends it's more relaxed, a little something called 'Fisherman's Blues' the theme tune of which is, for the cogniscenti, a gentle tune of the same name by the Hothouse Flowers, but today I wasn't in the mood to imagine myself languishing beside a gentle English river, whilst fluffy white clouds scudded across a metallic blue sky, so I reached towards the remote control and ......aaarrghh!!! there it was, all eight legs of it, one waving languidly in the air, my bete noir, the horny autumnal male house spider.

Seeing a spider at 6am is bad enough, seeing a spider when you can only move and walk very slowly is pas un joke, not funny, no no not at all. So I did the only thing possible, I intercommed Katy. Now Katy, as her regular readers will know, went on the Friendly Spider course last year,
so although she is generally very displeased to be called that early, she immediately cheered up, and rushed downstairs ready to exhibit her spider catching skills. When she entered the sitting room, I was leaning in the chair as far as possible in the opposite direction to the spider with my eyes tightly shut and face screwed up like a three year old muttering 'No, no', under my breath.

My goodness, you should have seen Katy go, she whisked herself into the kitchen, and came back with a small pyrex bowl. Meanwhile, I struggled to my feet and shuffled off to the dining room. You know how they tell you that fear gives the crippled the ability to rise to their feet and run at times of deep fear and danger? Forget it. Didn't happen. Dragged myself with my customery gait of the wounded hyena into the dining room, and listened to Katy busying herself in the sitting room.

Of course the damn not so itsy-bitsy thing had vanished. Katy was tremendously brave, or perhaps not as the Friendly Spider course had supposedly rid her of fear, and she certainly didn't sound frightened. Then she brought my handbag (which she had searched!) and other impedimenta into the dining room, and told me that she couldn't find it. Then she went back and searched some more. There it was, nestling under a nectarine, which let me tell you was delicious (the nectarine, not the spider), but it's not easy to put a pyrex bowl over a nectarine and trap a spider, so off it went, like a greyhound out of its' trap, scuttling into the relative safety of underneath the radiator. And it hasn't been seen since.

I spent the next 3 hours in the dining room, defying doctors' orders to keep my legs elevated, until I could legitimately call her again. So I thought that I'd catch up on my much neglected blogging, only to find that I'd been away so long that blogger wouldn't let me post on my old site. So, here I am, old title, new url, and I will try to find something interesting to say more often.