When I was a kid, my parents did that thing where they bought an old farm house and did it up. It was a total wreck when they bought it for like 500 quid back in the early 80s. They spent two years doing it up, tackling all the plumbing and everything themselves. They did it together with this other family but it was still a big job, and for the first year of my life I was living in a caravan on the building site of this remote farm in the Yorkshire Dales.
When the house was finally ready to move into, I was also ready to start making memories. The place was still a building site though, and my first toy was a lump hammer, which I used to break one of my thumbs. I can still, to this day, bend it back in a sickening way that people find gross. Another favourite toy was a large plank of wood, which I used to pretend was a ‘chopper’… my mum was afraid I would chop it down on my own bare toes one day, so my dad took it away from me (making me cry) and gave it back shaped as a dinosaur sculpture (making me super happy).
So you can see this draughty old farm house now, see how I painted that in your mind? See how I also casually painted a vaguely feral family… like Wuthering Heights in the 80s or some shit. Yeah, you got that right. It was an awesome place to grow up, and it was fucking full of spiders. Big hairy long-legged gangling ones.
Spider Facts: These critters would have primarily been the Giant House Spider (Eratigena and Tegenaria species), which are famous for their size and speed, especially the males searching for mates in autumn. They thrive in old farmhouses because they’re full of undisturbed, dry, dark spaces like cellars, attics, big gaps behind skirting boards, and wall cavities. It’s basically a luxury hotel with a stable temperature and a reliable buffet of other insects to eat. Also, did you fucking know that Giant House Spiders have adapted over thousands of years to live with us. They’re not “outdoor” spiders. Chucking one outside, especially if it’s cold or wet, is a huge shock to these poor beautiful ugly bastards. It doesn’t know how to survive out there, can’t handle the temperature swings, and is easy prey. It’s much kinder to just move it to your garage or a shed if you don’t want it in the house. That’s not what we did though
Not sure why, but we had an empty fish tank. I didn’t have any fish, maybe I wasn’t allowed or maybe we did have one but the cats ate it. Either way, one of my earliest memories is of me pointing out huge spiders in the house and my dad having to scoop them up to put into my Aquarium of Spiders. He would pretend to get bitten by the especially big ones, but he was just joking though I didn’t know that at the time. WRONG There is no spider in the UK with the mandible power to bite a human to any noticeable degree.
Why is this cool? Why share this memory? What does it tell me about myself, and why would any of the millions of people who read and love this blog but routinely fail to post comments or send me money or parcels of much needed narcotics ever give a fuck either?
I think an Aquarium of Spiders is symbolically cool. It wasn’t just one big spider in a glass tank… it was a whole fucking avalanche of them. I mean I had loads, and they were all constantly crawling over each other trying to get away. It was like the arachnid version of Escape from New York or some shit down there. I bet there was one big cannibal boss who ate all the rivals in the centre of the storm. Maybe there were spiders fucking too and having babies… no idea how long my tank survived but I do remember it was crawling constantly.
That image of the tank, just a roiling mass of legs, always reminds me of that classic bit of movie trivia from Raiders of the Lost Ark. You know the scene where Alfred Molina gets covered in tarantulas at the start? Apparently, all the spiders they dumped on him were placid, non-moving males. They just sat there. To get that frantic, skin-crawling shot, the animal wrangler dropped one single female tarantula onto his chest. Suddenly, all the males ‘woke up’ and started scrambling over each other to get to her. My aquarium was just like that, but without the sexy, unifying purpose. It was just pure, eight-legged chaos. A pit of arachnid anarchy. And I was the weird little god-king staring down at them.
