Roommate

I came home quite late on Wednesday night and was checking my mail when I realised I had a roommate. I've become very used to living by myself, and I wasn't best pleased to discover that I was sharing my apartment with a large huntsman spider. The thing was about the size of my hand, and the last one I'd seen this big was in the house I lived in with my ex before we separated. I remember that one well, the kids found it and there was pandemonium in the house, it was like the circus had come to town. The twins came running "daddy there's a spider in our room and the boys are trying to kill it" (you have to imagine this said as though it's all one word to really get the effect), and so I went off to investigate. I was expecting a spider about the size of a 50c coin.

It wasn't, it was f&*cking enormous and I realised, as the boys looked at me, that I was going to have to be brave. While I'm not arachnophic I do have a healthy dose of fear when it comes to spiders, especially ones that look big enough to eat. I trapped it (between a glass dish and a newspaper) and then took it outside, where we released it into the garden to kill bugs. "Spiders", I told the children, "are our friends", and then went off discreetly to have a nervous breakdown.

My roommate spider was in a tricky position and I don't have a garden and having weighed up all the options, I decided to kill it. I had a couple of tries, even using my tennis racquet (backhand, it's more accurate for me) but he was too nimble. Eventually, after he'd wedged himself into a box containing CDs and stuff, I decided that we'd call it a draw. I went to sleep, hoping that the spider understood the deal we had: I stick to my end of the apartment, he sticks to his and if we don't see each other in the morning we pretend nothing happened. (As I described this to one of my colleagues he couldn't help wondering whether I'd had any other houseguests in this category. But my private life's not that lurid.)

Next morning he was gone, or maybe just hiding and I haven't seen him since. My favorite bit in the wiki entry on huntsmans is "They also tend to exhibit a 'cling' reflex if picked up, making them difficult to shake off and much more likely to bite".