wotiwrote

The strangely unpredictable weather of the last few months has had a number of effects on the house and garden. Firstly, everything looks lush and green, as though we were still in Spring. The flowers are missing, of course, which is a contributory reason for the second effect: the missing insects. On the days when the sun is beating down in an impersonation of Summer we have manged to sit outside to eat with no attacks from wasps or flies. It is reminiscent of being in Singapore, where constant spraying programmes - aimed, prinarily, at mosquitoes - kept the air insect free. This was yet another attempt by the Singapore government to convince investors that the island did not, in fact, reside in the Tropics.

No insects in the garden has seemingly coincided with a population explosion across almost all common spider varieties. Every morning the bushes and trees and fences and almost any point across which silk strands can be strung sport an array of webs like monochrome bunting. A large number of spiders have also been forced into the house in the search for food. These tend to be the hunting spiders and most room walls are now animated at different times of the day by the traffic of hungry arachnids. This does not please Kirstie. What pleases her even less is when she finds a hunter crossing the floor of her bedroom as she is about to climb into her bunk. It is hard to convince her that the spider is not on a mission to join her under her duvet.

More webs hang outside most of the windows of the house. It would be easy to get the impression that they were attempting to envelope the whole house, so numerous have they become. An arachnid version of 'The Birds', perhaps. But with the lack of insects I suspect that the number of our visitors will decline rapidly over the coming days. In the mean time it is an education in the variety of types and sizes of spiders.

So that's all right then.