Warning: May contain spiders

In the early hours of this morning a very very large spider decided to stroll across the carpet in my room. He spotted me and stopped right in the middle of the carpet staring at me, defying me to do something about it.

The best & most humane way to deal with them I find is to trap them in an upturned glass or similar and evict them from the house. The problem with this is that there's never a glass handy and so you have to leave the spider unattended whilst you go and find one. This is of course where you make the error. You return with a suitable glass and the spider has scarpered. If it's only a little spider it's not too bad. If it's a great big juicy hairy one, you know that this means you're not going to get a wink of sleep until you track the blighter down.

Don't misunderstand me - I'm not frightened of spiders. If they stay sat in a corner spinning a web and catching all those irritating flies I'm quite happy for them to have house room. However, the moment they take it on themselves to start wandering, that's it they're out of here.

So there I was at 1am faced with a spider showdown. My options, move off the sofa to get a glass and risk coming back to find he'd disappeared, or to use whatever was in reach to stop him in his tracks. I considered dropping the dictionary on his head, the downsides being that I might miss, or that I'd have juicy squished spider ick stuck to a nice book and probably a nasty stain on the cream carpet to forever scream at me that I'm a spider murderer. Fortunately there was also a plastic sandwich type box that contained craft embellishments. This box had the advantages of being within easy reach, being see-through so I could check the spider status within it and finally and most importantly being quite large therefore maximizing the spider catching opportunity. So, I emptied the box, leaned over the sofa and... caught the fiendish blighter! Mwwwaaaaaaaahhhhhaa (that was evil laughter by the way) He was now under my control!

You thought there'd be some point to this post didn't you, but no there isn't (the next morning he was shown the door and peace returned to the land).