For the last week or so, Other Half has had a visitor in his conservatory, a visitor he didn’t invite and didn’t want. In fact, a visitor which made him extremely nervous.

You see, a spider had taken up residence inside the end of one of the open metal tubes which fit at the top of the roof blinds to hold them rigid. And the roof blind in question was right up above his chair.

Every little while, this spider would come out of the tube and sit and stare down at him disconcertingly. Other times, it would scuttle back inside leaving two legs sticking out of the end, just to remind him it was still there! Occasionally, the legs would be withdrawn too, and OH would be sent into a tailspin of paranoia.

Where was the spider!!

Apparently, to an arachnophobe, there is only one thing worse than having a spider stare down at you from his position above your head, and that’s when it disappears altogether because you don’t know where it’s gone, and it could be anywhere!!

So when a spider comes into the house, I normally volunteer to collect it and throw it outside where it belongs because there is nothing funny about arachnophobia and I’m simply not scared of them. However, I have a dodgy neck and a rotator cuff injury, which makes doing things with my arms above my head rather difficult.

Yesterday OH was away for the afternoon, and Son No. 1 came round, so I enlisted the Tall One’s help in evicting the spider. We devised a Cunning Plan, which went like this -

1 - We would clear the space under the bottom end of the blind, and then open it. This would mean that the spider was no longer up at the apex of the conservatory roof, but merely at the top of the windows.

2 - I would prepare a spider shelter consisting of an open box containing screwed up newspaper to place on the windowsill, in case the spider went all kamikaze on us - the idea being that it would hide in the paper and not run away altogether.

3 - I would also have the traditional spider catching equipment - viz: one glass tumbler plus sheet of thick paper.

4 - Then (and this is the Cunning Part) the Tall One would gently poke a piece of curtain wire into the end of the metal tube and encourage the spider to come out of the opposite end so that I could make the capture.

Of course, the best laid plans gang oft astray, as they say north of the border. We took a video of the whole operation so that OH would know for sure the Spider Had Gone. It’s far too long for Photobucket and contains incriminating footage .. um … inchage. Whatever. So I made a slideshow, because I thought you might like to have a laugh at our expense.

Now, that should have been the end of the matter, shouldn’t it?

Sadly not.

The very next morning, Yellow Swordfish was sitting in his usual chair and looked up .. and there, to his horror, was a new spider! Clearly, seeing a vacancy, the damn thing had moved in!

I tell ya, arachnophobes attract them. It’s the only explanation.

You know it’s true.

There are gremlins that live among us, and they wreak havoc in the best run household.

Now, I’m the first to admit this is not exactly one of the best run households - I’ve always hated housework, and I’ve never seen the point of a floor you could eat off when I could be doing something more enjoyable. But now I have all these tedious health limitations and to be frank, housework hurts.

So the little gremlins who sneak around hiding remote controls and eating biros and collecting dog hair and tossing it into the clean laundry and the dishwasher - those gremlins, who lose telephone numbers and shopping lists and eat the last biscuit, those little imps have been having a field day.

But yesterday they went too far.

As a direct result of gremlin activity, I realised I was going to freeze this winter. And I was also condemned to manage with only one duvet cover, the other having mysteriously disappeared along with one half of my four seasons quilt. Or duvet. Whatever you like to call it.

How did this happen? Well, at the beginning of the summer, I split the quilt as usual, putting the thicker half away and leaving the light and silky, featherweight half on the bed for the warmer months. I put it away somewhere safe. And those darned gremlins* stole it!

It wasn’t until yesterday that I realised the extent of their perfidy. I went to change the bed, and when I looked for the clean duvet cover, there it was … gone!! It was not in the laundry bin. It was not on the drying rack, in the tumble drier, the airing cupboard, or any of the various drawers and cupboards I use to store bed linens. Neither was the other half of my duvet. Quilt. Whatever. They were gone!

Other Half was convinced that, at some point, the missing duvet cover would turn up. He said it Had To Be Somewhere.

Ha!

I looked for it, only I was somewhat hampered by not being allowed in the Gremlin Dimension, and I wouldn’t bet a dead beetle on them bringing it back just because I asked nicely.

‘John Lewis - that’s the thing’, I thought. ‘I’ll pop into town tomorrow and just buy some new stuff. That’ll fix their little wagon!’

But this morning, just to be sure, I determined to take everything out of the airing cupboard and examine every single item - no matter if it did look like a pair of pink socks or a blue shirt. Everything was coming out, and I would prove, once and for all, that the duvet cover, plus the winter half of my duvet, were both irretrievably lost. And then I’d go shopping.

And, would you believe it? There, on the very top shelf (where I never ever put duvet covers or quilts) were both of the missing items!! And the quilt had somehow got inside the cover and buttoned itself up … and it had to be gremlins, because I absolutely, one hundred percent, refuse to believe that I’ve been managing all summer by washing my one and only duvet cover and getting it straight back on the bed, and that for some bizarre reason, I had stuffed both the missing items up into that black hole, still together and therefore unwashed.

Surely it has to be the gremlins …

Tell me - how old am I again? And have I had my tea yet?

* To be fair, it could have been the Nac Mac Feagles.

Today’s nominees for the awards are:

Kick Ass Blogger - This one goes to Drowsey Monkey. Drowsey is one of my favourite bloggers, and never fails to amuse and entertain. I like the fact that her content is so varied, too!

Brillante - One of the first blogs to be added to my feed reader was English Mum in Ireland and it’s been sitting there giving me pleasure ever since. Well done, EM - you’re a bright spot in the blogosphere!

Today’s Top Commenter is Ruth Hull Chatlien. Ruth has an excellent and inspirational blog of her own, but still finds the time to go around and leave interesting and thoughtful comments on others. Thanks, Ruth!

On a whim this evening, partly inspired by Baino, I looked up one of my childhood homes on Google maps, using the satellite view.

I was born in London, but when I was ten years old my father got a new job, in Tiptree, and I got my first experience of moving house. It was a bit of a culture shock all round - we moved from an eighth floor flat in the city to a semi-detached house in a medium-sized village. Mum breathed a sigh of relief, being a country girl, and was soon elbow deep in compost, planting things in the garden. My older brother chose to go to a college in London and so he pretty much continued living there, but my younger brother and I had a little adjusting to do. For the first time in my life I was allowed outdoors by myself. I had a garden to wander out into, and kids my age just outside my front door, and I made the most of it.

I ended up having a long walk to school - if you look at the map above, my home is marked by the blue tag towards the top, and my school by the blue tag near the bottom. Oh, I was given money for the bus, but you know what kids are. We used to pop into the shop and spend the bus fare on sweets, or stop the milkman on his rounds and buy a third of a pint of orange juice in real glass bottles … so my friends and I would walk the mile or so to school in all weathers and think nothing of it. In fact we used to take detours and find different routes, and play in streams and fields on the way, and buy apples from trays outside people’s houses if we had any money left - and when I looked at that satellite picture today it made me a little bit sad.

Gone is the huge triangular field where a friend of mine once tried to ride a cart horse bareback and fell off, breaking her arm. Gone is the disused railway track we would walk along to pick wild strawberries between the tracks. Gone, the Kiltie Cake Shop and the little grocery where we could put our pennies together and buy a few ounces of biscuits, sold loose from big wooden boxes and handed to us in brown paper bags.

The meadow where I picked bunches of wild red and white campion is gone, and so is the brook. There are houses there now, and the brook is probably buried in a concrete pipe. The rough, sandy bank near the crossroads is gone. I used to catch lizards on that bank and watch them blinking in the palm of my hand for a few seconds, before they leaped to freedom.

The pond is gone, for goodness’ sake! That pond was an institution! Where did the pond go?

But, hey, the old windmill is still there, and the playing field too, and none of it has been sold off for housing, although they’ve tidied it up a tad. They’ve enclosed the play equipment with a neat little fence and put down some kind of kid-proof surface. I don’t know what was wrong with grass, but there you go.

My Dad worked for the Anchor Press, which churned out thousands of paperbacks, including Dennis Wheatley and Barbara Cartland among the popular titles. Now, there is yet another housing estate where the Anchor Press used to be, and it was one of the two biggest employers in the village. I wonder what happened?

The other big employer is still there - Wilkins’ jam factory. I used to earn pocket money picking strawberries for Wilkins, and let me tell you, those Little Scarlett strawberries were the very devil to pick - they used to pay us extra for those! So small! And yet, so deliciously sweet! Wilkins jam is now Tiptree Conserve - you can still buy it, and it’s still expensive. ‘By Appointment to the Queen’ … I wonder if she ever knew that my brother’s friend, working there during the summer holidays many years ago, dropped his lunchtime peanuts into the vat?

Go on, look up your childhood home on Google maps, and see what’s happened to it. I dare you.

If you moved away and haven’t been back, my guess is that you’re in for a shock.

I was abruptly taken back to my childhood while reading Not Afraid To Use It this morning, because a question which blighted her childhood also echoed through mine. It was a metaphorical question, and you can bet your life that if we’d answered that one, we’d have been in very deep shit indeed.

Looking back, it seems to me that our parents came out with certain stock phrases without too much thought about what effect they might have. Maybe it was simply that their parents said them, or maybe they used them because they had the desired effect of making the kid shut up. Whatever the reason, many children of my generation heard the same things, over and over again.

So let’s examine a few of those phrases, and see if they’re as bad as I remember them. We’ll start with the one mentioned by Not Afraid To Use It in her blog post. ‘Just who do you think you are?‘

What does this say to a child? It says ‘you are not good enough for that’. It says ‘you are far too confident in my love for you if you think you can say that to me and get away with it’. Uh … don’t we want our children to grow up feeling worthy and confident and trust that we love them no matter what? I thought we did …

I used to get ‘who do you think you are?‘ when I questioned my Mum’s dictates on what I should wear or how I should behave. Now, I was basing my rebellion on the fact that my brothers were treated differently, but I had failed to take into account the facts that a) they were older than me, and b) I was a girl. However, I still think it would have been better had she pointed these things out to me and explained why she was making me conform to different standards. For instance, ‘I know, love, it’s tough isn’t it, but life just ain’t fair’ might have been easier to take. As it was, I was so wounded that I did indeed shut up, and I was still following Mum’s rules three decades later, when they were well and truly redundant.*

Another one I heard with distressing regularity was ‘Those who ask don’t get‘ which was often followed by ‘.. and those who don’t ask, don’t want‘. What kind of a twisted, sadistic thing is this? So you’re fucked whatever you do? Oh, way to teach a child the concept of learned helplessness and make sure they don’t try anything!

‘Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about‘. Classic! If a child’s upset enough to cry real tears, what are the chances that they can recover their equilibrium by sheer force of will-power? Yep, pretty well non-existent. So in saying this, you’re ensuring that the child becomes instantly more upset and you can get even more righteously angry at them. Sheesh. Great parenting lesson.

Well. at least my parents never - ever - said anything like ‘Don’t you fucking swear at me, you little bitch‘, a phrase I actually heard aimed at a toddler in a local shopping centre at ten o’clock one night by a very young mother.

Most kids had more responsible parents than that, of course, and most took the admonishments in their stride, but for those who took things to heart and who tended to think too deeply, they caused lasting damage, and clearly I was a sensitive soul because I grew up insecure, seriously lacking in confidence, and with an absolutely terrible self-image.

As you know, I’m not a fan of political correctness, but this isn’t a matter of PC gone mad. It’s psychologically damaging when conundra like this are aimed at children too young to understand, especially when they’re said in anger. Now, my parents loved me, that’s without question, and I’m pretty sure they were doing their level best to bring me up properly. They must have said these things without the faintest notion of how much they hurt. So if those words could screw us up so badly without our parents ever being aware of it, doesn’t that beg a very obvious question?

Yeah, that’s right. This one -

What damage have we done to our own kids without realising it?

* Yes, in my late forties. Then I discovered Johnny Depp and his ‘fuck it’ attitude to life.