The downstairs loo is out of bounds for me at the moment. Being back in the country has its benefits and its horrors. Prime amongst its horrors is the presence of thousands of bloody spiders. As a child, my bedroom floor was a spider graveyard – two or three spiders would be spotted a week, I’d leap feet into the air, find something aggressive to hit them with and then be too horrified by the corpses to clear them up. Two days ago I went into the downstairs loo to discover that I would be observed by a huge spider sitting half way up the wall. I haven’t been in it since. Six hours after meeting my arachnid nemesis my brother went for a pee. He reappeared seconds later saying that he’d have to go upstairs because of the huge bloody spider. At least I’m not alone…
Returning from a film this evening with my brother in the car, we look up at the full moon and notice something neither of us have seen before. Surrounding the moon is a huge circle of difuse light – clean edges on the inside fading gradually to black on the outside. It looks like a huge iris in the sky – electric blue and black. My parents arrived shortly afterwards. Neither of them had seen anything like it before either.