Hairy Spiders, Hairy Maclary - I can feel a theme coming on

Happy Australia Day! Unfortunately far from breaking out the beer round the barbie I have been marching around Sydney today attractively clad in bright yellow sou’wester, a relic of my New York days when I expected rain, snow, sleet and hail on a pretty regular basis. Although the weather over the last couple of days can be officially classified as filthy, I can’t complete the outfit with my leopard skin wellies as they had been stored in the pool box over the theoretically dry summer and as a result are now soaking wet. I have hung them upside down by the back door partly to dry out and partly because having spotted a hand sized huntsman spider crawling into Husband’s docksiders last week, I am incredibly loathe to stick my hands, or indeed my toes, into any potential spider hidey hole. I am not usually particularly squeamish about spiders but I tend to get a bit twitchy tackling those that a) have legs that are visibly hairier than my own and b) that require a sizeable container for capture.

Early on in our marriage in a show of bravado I attempted to capture a huntsman marching with evil intent down the sloping ceiling above our bed, and just for reference when I describe huntsmen spiders as hand-sized I am not in one of my exaggeration prone moments though I should also add in the interests of accuracy that I do have quite small hands. Husband had refused to man up to the situation and in a ‘well, this just shows women are best’ type gesture, I tackled the thing using a jug. It was somewhat unfortunate that in my triumph I forgot that jugs have spouts and with a Machiavellian cunning the spider shot out the spout and dropped straight on top of the man who hates spiders with a passion, from memory it was hard to tell who exited the bed fastest but there were certainly a fair number of legs, all hairy, flashing around in panic.

Hurrah - the sun has just come out - maybe there's hope for all those barbeques yet. The back garden has taken on jungle like tendencies as a result of all the rain and humidity, and I have to report that my hair seems to have gone for a similar growth spurt. Given I had it all cut off three weeks ago it's a little disconcerting to find I am back in the running for best 'Hairy Maclary from Donaldsons Dairy' look alike - though I suppose it's slightly preferable to a resemblance to that other great canine creation of Lynley Dodds, 'Schnitzel von Krumm with a very low tum'.