Look away now if you do not like to read about spiders

We attempted a camping trip and it was not a success. I think you'd have to say it wasn't successful. I acquired my current bout of sickness while we were away and got home just in time for the full-blown fever. So then there was two or maybe three days in bed, and when I say 'bed' I mean the fold-out bed in the study where I retreated to quarantine myself, and on which I haven't slept before, turns out it's so uncomfortable that it must have been deliberately designed that way. Fucking hipster fold-out bed designers! Fever is gone now and I feel just enough like shit to be unable to take proper advantage of this one-in-a-billion day (nice weather, annual leave, child happily ensconced in holiday program). Well, I'm not complaining. IM NOT

When I was packing up every piece of crap we own to cram it into the car to take it camping with us I brought in a cloth bag from out of the shed. God, one day I will blog the inside of our shed and then you will really understand why I deserve nothing good in life.  Anyway, the cloth bag. It had been in the shed for maybe four years and it had some patterns in that I was going to get rid of because about four years ago I suddenly realised I was never going to sew any of those patterns. So I put the patterns back into the chest of patterns drawers and used the bag to hold the clothes I wanted to take camping.

Cut to the first morning of actual camping, I was in the tent taking my clothes out of the bag - clothes I was shortly going to put onto my body - when I saw a spider crawling with intent down the side of it. It was a horrible spider. Now, it wasn't a huntsman - I know what a frigging huntsman looks like for god's sake - but it was the same colour, ie horrifying rusty brown, and it was about the size of a half-grown huntsman, and it was pointy in the body and legs rather than kind of rounded like a huntsman. In short, a very bad looking spider. So without taking my eyes off it I slid across to the door of the tent and reached outside and picked up a couple of gum leaves. I held the leaf in the spider's path hoping it would crawl slowly onto the leaf (but not then immediately swap crawling for speed running, and run up my arm and onto my face, into my mouth etc). Of course it did not go on the leaf it went under it where I couldn't see it. Spiders suck. So I pushed the bag up to the doorway and as the red mist descended I flicked the spider out the door. It went outside which was great, but then I couldn't see where it went.



When we got home from 'camping' (I'm not going to go into the tragic details of how much a gigantic fail of a camping trip it was) I was unloading the car and I slung that bag of clothes on the couch in the study (ironically that very same piece of shit fold-out bed I mentioned earlier). A little later I was unpacking stuff and I picked up the bag to take it to my room.

On the couch where the bag had been there was a spider exactly like the one in Apollo Bay.

So what I think is that the first spider was one of a clan of about nine, that had been living in the bag in the shed, and all of them hid in the bag's corners when I picked it up and shoved my stuff in there. And the second one I saw was one of the remaining eight. And those two were were dumb enough to come out and thus got seen, but the remaining seven got into my underwear, my shoes, my bathers, and most of all, into my black trousers with six pockets. I'm still going to put them on now though.