From late summer on the spiders webs start to appear. Not indoor cobwebs, those things that you only ever notice just after you’ve finished cleaning the house, but the big fat proper ones, the ones a bit like a see-through dart-board that remind you of Halloween. And of course each of these big fat webs has a big fat spider sitting in the middle of it. I suppose autumn must be dinnertime for arachnids. Apparently they only need to eat twice a year, though I never see so many webs like this in the spring. Anyway, a few years ago, by accident, I found a new game to play:

I was having a cigarette outside someone’s house one night and, by accident, I dropped a nob of ash onto a spider’s web. Of course it made the web quiver and, like a shot, out of nowhere a spider appeared. This one was so obviously hungry you could practically hear the cutlery rattle, and it rushed straight up to the ash and bit it, and then stopped. I know biologists say that animals don’t register emotion like humans do and we’re just anthropomorphising or projecting of something, but I could swear the irritation was palpable.

The spider looked at the ash; the ash wobbled a bit in the breeze. Then, with the most extraordinary delicacy, the spider wrapped a few strands of silk around the ash, so it was lightly tied together like a parcel. Not a flake moved, the trussing was so precise. The spider then snipped most of the strands of web away from the ash so that it was held like a spit-roast between two threads, which the spider then started to rotate with its legs, all the while playing out new silk onto the crumbly surface. Faster and faster went the little packet of ash, and as it spun round and round, it grew smaller as the thread compressed the bundle, making it all the while more solid. Then, one of the remaining two strands was cut away so that the package dangled, a little more gossamer was added for luck, and, with a final snip, the offending parcel dropped into the bush below.

The whole process took about ten minutes, maybe a little less.

Maybe that night I also projected other feelings onto the spider, including a sense of satisfaction at a job well done, along with the kind of grumpiness you find in caretakers when they have to mop up a floor someone has spilled drink on, or maybe it was just feeings of guilt on my part.

Unfortunately though, my sense of guilt has not been strong enough to stop me carrying out this act of petty vandalism on several occasions since, and each time, the same thing happens. It really is the most perfect performance, and so fastidious. I tell myself that unwanted stuff like bits of leaf and fluff and the like must get blown into spiders webs regularly and having a bit of a clean up is all in a days work for the average spider, but I know the spiders know I’m lying to myself.