When I was about 9 or so I saw the movie Arachnophobia. Before that I didn’t really give spiders a great deal of thought. They were there sometimes, and my Mum would call them Harold and they were pretty much ignored and eventually they weren’t there anymore. I actually remember letting a little house spider crawl up my fingers and over my hands once in the garden.

Then I saw this fucking picture. Arachnophobia!

How many people are now terrified of spiders as a direct result of this movie? I don’t think I even saw the entire flick, but it has RUINED ME. Since that day I have grown steadily more and more afraid of spiders, to the point where I am a grown man who will sit in abject petrified terror staring at the very thing which haunts him because if I look away for even a second and that spider isn’t there anymore... I will kill myself rather than live in constant fear of it showing up again on my face or in my dinner.

I’ve gotten worse over the past couple of years, it has to be said. There was a time, way in the past, when I was even able to catch spiders, or kill them should things get a bit ‘me or him’. I remember when I was 17 dropping a shoe on this real leggy bastard as it stalked across the dark living room carpet like it fucking owned the place. I was calm, casual... just bopped it with the shoe and Hoovered it right up, carried on watching TV.

I don’t know where or when, but at some point things just started to escalate. Instead of being able to do the old Glass-bit-of-card routine I found that I couldn’t make my hand move forwards to place the glass over the spider. Not even if I tried to force it. Bigger and bigger glasses made no difference, and one time I attempted a Pyrex mixing dish to no avail. Then I stopped being able to hit the shoe solution. The idea of being able to feel the beast squish or crunch, even though there’s no way I’d actually be able to through a size 11 DC trainer, freaked me out to no end.

Couple of years back I thought I saw a spider in my Mum’s house, shit myself because I lost sight of it briefly and was so incredibly relieved when I discovered it was a mouse. I put some peanut butter down for that mouse and moved on, so happy was I that it only had 4 legs.

It’s just the way they move. It’s not OK. All creeping and stalking about the place. They have no respect for gravity, forever pissing about up walls. There was a spider in the very room I’m sitting in a couple of months ago that was so massive it was struggling to get up the wall. Just having to heave itself up was a strain, and you could see it almost fall a few times. That was terrifying. If it falls, gets disoriented, then runs at me, that’s it for me. I’ll be too afraid to move. It will get me. No doubt.

I get the piss taken out of me all the time, which is bullshit. Just because spiders are smaller than me doesn’t make it a less legitimate fear. Would you laugh at someone who was scared of rapists? No! And a rapist isn’t even venomous and he only has 2 legs. Granted, you couldn’t dispatch a rapist with a Hoover or rolled up bit of newspaper, but I can’t use those things on spiders either so I consider them to be of equal value when it comes to terror.

Once I came home to find that a spider had strung a single line of web width ways across the door and was sitting in the centre of it, essentially barring me from my own home! Who the fuck does he think he is? Tiny little bouncer, guarding my house from me. I couldn’t get in. I couldn’t find anything that was long enough to be able to knock the spider to the floor and then twat it away, without the spider jumping on to the end and running up it and into my hair. They jump you know! I’ve fucking seen it.

At this point I wouldn’t even class how I feel about spiders as fear. It’s beyond that now. I can’t catch them, I can’t kill them and I can’t live in a world where they exist.

Plus we don’t have a Hoover!

No Spider Man - Brought to you by Gazz Wood -