Dear Readers, many of you have been following the story of my Mum and Dad’s 60th Anniversary Party last Thursday. It went very well, and for some photos and a few more details, have a look at my second post today called ‘The Party’. On the other hand, if you come here for the wildlife, read on……

Dear Readers, I know that autumn has arrived when I can’t get to the shed without walking through a web, and when the children returning from school always stop to point at the many, many spiders who are making their homes in the lavender in my front garden. However, it is surprising to see how many different habitats these creatures can make use of, and how thoroughly at home they can make themselves with the slightest of encouragement.

Apologies in advance to any arachnophobic readers. You might want to move on at this point. No spiders next week, I promise.

if you want to create a wildlife reserve actually inside your house, I can recommend nothing more than a disinclination to dust and some old-fashioned sash windows. For, at the back of my house, guarding the kitchen and gobbling up all manner of small insects is a rather splendid False Widow Spider. I have no idea of the species, because this can only be determined by killing the spider and dissecting her genitalia, and I have no intention of doing any such thing. Instead, I am watching the spider (who I have named Beverley on the basis that this can be a male or female name, and his/her sex is yet another thing that I don’t know) as s/he goes about the business of repairing her web.

For most of the day, s/he keeps a low profile in the little hole that used to house a window lock.

But sometimes she ventures out to see what’s going on. Her web reminds me rather of Stratford Bus Station (or maybe that’s just me).

False Widows have been the subject of many overwrought headlines in the more distasteful parts of the British press, and I dread to think how many perfectly innocent spiders have been squished to ‘save our children’ from being bitten. Just persuade little Johnnie not to stick his finger into the spider’s house and all shall be well. Even the mention of ‘Widow’ can be enough to put some people into a flap, in spite of  the word ‘False’ at the start. But it’s probably just as well not to get me started, or we shall be here all day.

Apparently a female False Widow can live for up to five years, and as I’ve had a spider living here for a while, I’m guessing that she may turn into a long-term companion.

Anyhow, as far as I’m concerned s/he is not just a spider, but is guarding the back entrance of the house from from evildoers like a trusty bullmastiff. As her web is stronger, pound for pound, than steel, I feel that this is only a slight overstatement.

But who is guarding the front of the house? Meet Frances/Francis.

Fran has made a web the size of the entire windowpane, and seems to be growing bigger every day. I often wonder why there are no spiders about, and then suddenly hundreds of them, but it seems that it’s largely because, by the end of August, they’ve grown big enough for us to start paying attention.

I love the crucifix of white dots on the abdomen of these spiders, not to mention their little stripey legs. They seem, like caterpillars, to be creatures of childhood. My mother was terrified of spiders, but always managed to hide it from me, which meant that I found them delightful rather than horrifying. I always loved Charlotte, the canny spider of Charlotte’s Web, and would spend hours watching the spiders carefully spinning their webs.

Spiders seem to me to be something that we all have in common, for every nation that I know has some kind of spider that spins an orb web and has a whole mass of folklore about the creature, from the Ancient Egyptian goddess Neith (thought to be the precursor to the Babylonian Ishtar and the Greek Arachne) to Anansi in Western Africa, and the Lakota Iktomi. Spiders feature in Australian Aboriginal art, in the ancient mythology of Japan, and in both the Islamic and Judaic oral traditions. Who could not look at a spider and not marvel at her skill and her patience?

But out in the shed, it’s a whole other story. The place is full of cobwebs, and the corpses of unfortunate flying insects who met their end amongst the bird food and the power tools. And, somewhat surprisingly, these spiders are the most ferocious of all, not to humans but to other spiders.

This creature is also known as the Daddy Long-Legs Spider, but that way madness lies. For me, a Daddy Long-Legs is a cranefly. In North America, a Daddy Long-Legs is what I call a harvestman. So I’m going to stick with calling these creatures Pholcus. They look like some kind of lunar landing module, or possibly a virus. You can tell you’ve found a Pholcus if you disturb it and it vibrates up and down  like some kind of very, very angry small dog.

For all their sinister appearance, these spiders are totally harmless to humans. However, they seem to be adept at catching and eating other spiders, even those that are much larger than they are. My friends on the Spiders of Britain and Northern Europe Facebook group report that Pholcus reduce the biodiversity in their houses by killing and eating all the other spiders. Furthermore, they breed rapidly when happy, and can soon outnumber all the other species. Some members of the group devote themselves to catching every Pholcus they can find and putting it out into their sheds. I feel that I have fallen amongst friends. I thought I was the only person who would put off getting the window cleaner in until the winter because of the spiders, but it appears that there are numerous other folk who are just as eccentric as I am. Which is something of a relief.

So, there we have it. I’m sure this is only a tiny fraction of the spider species in and around my house – I haven’t seen an actual house spider this year, for example, and I’m sure that there are lots of others hiding in the undergrowth and lurking under stones. Personally, I find them fascinating, and I’m only sorry that the jumping spider who sometimes creeps across my front door like a Special Forces agent on surveillance didn’t  put in an appearance. And soon, all these eight-legged wonders will disappear as autumn edges into winter, and all the adult spiders either die (many providing a meal for their offspring), or go into a state of torpor to wait out the cold. They represent a brief explosion of life, the last bloom before the stillness falls.