boreders

I can’t believe we’ve come around to that time of year again when the days grow short and the driving grows dark. I hate driving headlit, ploughing through the gloom and darkness. Hard enough keeping track of all the idiots on the road when you can see them clearly.

In the UK, you should drive with headlights an hour before sunset and an hour after sunrise. Yet again, people fail miserably to remember anything they learnt while they had a test to pass. So, I found myself driving home at the beginning of the week gazing in disbelief at the three drivers I saw who persisted in keeping their lights off well into the late gloom period. I mean, I even flashed one of these idiots and nothing seemed to register. The motorway was filled with cars, all lit up – and yet it didn’t seem to phase these guys. It’d be like turning up at a fancy dress party dressed in shirt and jeans to find everyone else dressed in Halloween costumes… and then spending the entire evening utterly oblivious to the funny looks you’re getting.

I realise I should be concentrating on my own driving, but sometimes as I overtake on the motorway I glance across into the car next to me and I might as well be seeing something from a Romero movie. Drivers with vacant eyes, gripping the steering wheel with stiff fingers, focus unmoving. You might as well remove the mirrors and indicators from these cars, cause once they settle into the middle lane, that’s it until they get home.

Anyway… on the upside, I just went to the garage to get something from the fridge – and I found myself with a shadow. A moon shadow. I looked up to find the dark sky lit by a brilliant crescent moon, a scattering of bright stars dotted around the heavens between wisps of thin cloud. You can get a sky like that any time, but somehow I like them best in the autumn. Autumn and I get on just fine, because I’m not allergic to anything at this time of year and it isn’t so cold your extremities fall off after 5 minutes outside. Perfect.

Until I have to get behind the wheel of the car again…

Apparently, the Steatoda Nobilis, Britain’s only biting spider, has claimed another victim in Devon, where some poor soul disturbed a nest and got a nasty bite on the neck. No… don’t ask me how. Maybe he was in the attic or something and the spider launched a sneak attack. The article, in the Metro, features a picture of the ‘false’ Black Widow (the Steatoda Nobilis is related, distantly one would hope) which defies easy scaling; but, a little research brings relief from confusion. Another article on BBC News online (from September 2001) shows the same sort of spider with a far better judgement of scale. Knowing it’s about the size of my thumbnail makes it all the more comforting to know it lives down south at the moment!

Given this article (on BBC News) is almost seven years old, you’d think people would have had time to prepare for this sort of encounter. It must be the sort of thing that comes up down the pub all the time. As the Steatoda Nobilis first set up home at the beginning of the last century, it isn’t as if this has been some undercover assault on the shores of the UK. No doubt some fanatical collector carried it home from the Canary Islands or it hitched a ride in a shipment of something or other. The fact that it has spread across the whole of south coastal England in a hundred year residence seems like slow progress to me. Fascinating that this arachnid from warmer climes has managed to make the transition to the chilly damp of England in a relatively short space of time. Isn’t the natural world fascinating!