I need a hero

I had a somewhat life threatening day a couple of days ago, well maybe not life threatening perhaps more traumatic but we’ll say life-threatening because that sounds more dramatic.

There I was dashing down the stairs at home and in my enthusiasm struck the top of my head very hard off the door frame at the bottom of the stairs. (I sleep with my feet in a wardrobe, why would it surprise you that it’s like going into a cupboard to go upstairs?) Being my usual self I decided to ignore any possible medical concerns over having done this, despite the fact that I quickly developed a bad headache, felt really sick and also got really sleepy, which are all signs of concussion. Of course, if it is only a mild concussion then you just need someone to keep an eye on you as you shouldn’t be alone. Except my landlady was away and so I only had the cat to dial 999 or drive me to the hospital. Whilst I’d draw the line at the cat doing mouth to mouth, I did put a few cushions in the car so the cat could see over the steering wheel if the need arose.

A friend sent me a number of texts telling me to phone NHS direct even if I wouldn’t actually go the doctors. Of course she can’t have been that concerned as she couldn’t actually be bothered to get up off the sofa and drive me somewhere to get medical help.

It was just a good job I had the cat there to look after me and protect me. Because cats, they’re fearless and brave, they can walk along the top of fences and not fall off, they can curl up on your lap and give you a bit of TLC, they can lick their own bottoms... *thinks* Er, maybe that last one isn’t entirely relevant here, but anyway they can be handy to have about in a crisis, a crisis such as a huge spider lurking in the living room. Or so I thought... And now we move on to trauma number two.

I was in the living room thinking I should put the rubbish out when I saw a massive spider, and I do mean really massive, standing by the living room door. Just to give a couple of illustrations of how big this spider was *gets out a crayon and a bit of paper* oh, no not that sort of illustration… it was about as big as the spider which came to an untimely demise with some boiling water when I was living with evil landlady a few years ago. But more pertinent here perhaps is that about a week ago, I saw the same spider and the reason I saw it was because it fell off a curtain that was about 10 feet away from me on to a wooden floor and I heard it hit the floor. Now that spider was either wearing some heavy duty boots or it was a *very* big spider. That time it just scuttled off into the shadows and I was all brave despite spending the next few hours looking over to that corner of the room in a paranoid fashion.

However, this time the spider had gained a new bravado and was sitting there all smug by the door taunting me. I decided I’d sneak past it and go and sort out the rubbish in the hope that it would have disappeared by the time I got back. So I made it past the spider and opened the front door and there was the cat waiting to come in. “I’m saved!” I thought “The cat will rescue me”. So she wandered into the living room and I shut the door to keep both the spider and the cat in there and I went outside to sort out the rubbish. But the next thing I knew the cat was outside with me wrapping herself round my legs and following me everywhere I went. This is the same cat that normally does a slightly pathetic scratch on the living room door as she can’t be bothered to open it, but this time she had that door open quicker than Houdini escaping from a safe fifty feet under water and encased in cement.

When I went back into the house, the cat followed me in but skulked about trying to avoid the spider. Now come on, surely if even a cat is scared of a spider that must show that it is big?! So I was in a dilemma, what do you do with a spider in these circumstances? You have given it time to skulk off, you have tried to get the cat to eat it, you’re quickly running out of options as you’re guessing your landlady is not going to be too impressed by you pouring boiling water on the carpet to kill it. But then the old ‘suck it up in the hoover’ trick came to mind.

There’s a choice of two hoovers, one is a Dyson, meaning bagless and made of clear plastic, so should the spider survive I’d be able to see it running about and tapping on the plastic to get out. Although having said that apparently if you vacuum up a spider it makes it implode. Nice. Anyway, I thought I’d go for the other hoover which is one which you fit a hose on and you can’t see inside it so all the evidence is well and truly hidden. So I snuck up on the spider, but still keeping as far away as possible, and managed to hoover it up just as it realised that all was not well and it tried to (eight) leg it. I left the hoover running for a bit afterwards just to make sure that it wasn’t hanging on for dear life, but I didn’t hear a small imploding sound at any point, so it might be building a nest in the hoover bag even now.

At this point the cat decided to roll about on the carpet and show how clever she was, which was indeed the case in that she got me to do all the hard work and now my only task left for the evening was to feed her. So she did quite well out of it. Cats, you can’t trust them in a crisis.

I was slightly wary the next morning when I came downstairs in case the spider had managed to survive and was now building a massive web to catch me in so that it could then attack me (as you can see my paranoia is entirely rational), but it was just the cat there to greet me and she just looked at me and meowed for her breakfast. Crisis over. I can, however, tell you that it will not be me who will be emptying the hoover bag.