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Arachnophobia
Do spiders trigger you?
Looking back, I was an unlikely candidate for arachnophobia. I spent my formative years in a lowly ground-floor flat with an outside toilet. The bottom of the door frame on said toilet was badly rotted, damp, and infested with every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
Sitting with a copy of the Beano comic, I would sometimes kick the rotten frame for amusement. This was an act akin to Jack Skellington unravelling the stitching on Oogie Boogie’s sleeve in The Nightmare Before Christmas, as woodlice and earwigs spilled to the floor. These were sometimes accompanied by a solitary orange centipede, which would rapidly snake its way up the brickwork to safety. The wall in front of me was studded with those spiders with the round bodies and very thin legs, which usually lay motionless.
As you can see, my tolerance of bugs was ingrained at an early age. So what went wrong?
Spider on the Duvet
I think I can pinpoint the moment. It was summer evening and I was a young man. I’d been to a local fairground with my then girlfriend, and we lay on her bed, dozing and watching TV. The window was open and, just as I was surrendering to Morpheus, my girlfriend screamed and jumped out of the bed. I saw a huge spider advancing across the duvet toward me, so I leapt from the…
