I clean windows. Sometimes. Not for a living, but as part of a system, but let’s not get in to that. You might see me and the lads driving around in a big yellow van. You might see tired expressions on our faces, because window cleaning isn’t exactly gratifying, but ‘somebody has to do it’, and it gets the beers bought.

I’m not writing about squeegies or buckets or big yellow vans now though, right now my thoughts are with the spider-babies.

Let’s take it as a given that I’m squeamish about spiders. I won’t hold them, but I won’t kill them… apart from that one time I found a Wolf Spider hunting my budgie with a view to kill. He got the hoover right up his ass.

Window Cleaning, however, poses a quandary. Spiders love to hatch nests in the corners of window frames, and it is our job to get rid of them. The only thing is, I have this latent Buddha thing in me that finds it tough to do this. It’s bad enough that I have to evict the mother spider, one swipe of the window mop and she’s earth bound. But I keep thinking about the worry in her head. By the time she finds the window sill and crawls back up to her corner, if she can indeed find it, she’ll have at least 50 nappies to change and hundreds will be crying, wondering where their mommy is.

What I’m SUPPOSED to do is destroy the egg sack too. So, when mommy does return, she finds a clean corner where her family once was. This keeps me awake at night. It at least gives me something to obsess about when I’m stoned. My work collegue says “It’s not like they’re in short supply or anything”, but isn’t that what Hitler said about the Jews?

So, to all the spiders out there, I’m sorry. I know that you all have a job to do, and you do it well. I’m glad earth isn’t infested with gazillions of flies. You do, however, creep the bejayzus out of me, so please, for your own good, keep yourselves and your babies outside a 10 meter radius of me. I can’t be held responsible for my actions.

It’s tough being a big softee.