The death of the two tailed spider

I went into the bathroom and froze. There sat an enormous spider, with a spike coming out of its back that looked like it wanted to kill me.

What happened next?

Well, first of all I stood at the otherside of the door and threw hairgrips at it I am, afterall, a girl. I hit it but it was precariously balanced on a soap dish and the hairgrips were too small to make an impact. So then I stood there for twenty minutes wondering if it was poisonous.

Then I looked at my flip flop. I took it off and tried to kill it by holding the flipflop at either end and then pushing down firmly, but then it danced away. So I put my flip flop back on.

I shut the bathroom door for a while and tried to pretend it wasn't there. But then I couldn't
convince myself that it wasn't there. Even when I almost believed myself, I knew I was lying.

So I opened the door again. It was still on the soap dish. Then I realised there was a large water bottle. So I tried to stab it. But then it jumped. And disappeared into a bucket. Which had water in it. The spider swam around. So I stabbed it again. And then it pretended to be dead. So I scrapped it across the side of the bucket with the edge of the bottle. And then it was definately dead. And then I went to sleep!

Blood on my hands.

michael?

I was sitting on the floor cushions in the restaurant of my hotel. It was about eleven o'clock at night. Every so often the power would short and plunge the guests into darkness. A group of Israeli's sat to my left listening to bad music and smoking too many drugs.

One of the Israeli's had a jokey conversation with the waiter and ordered a drink as the waiter headed out i called for an orange juice. He nodded and smiled and headed into the darkness.

Ten minutes later after an interesting conversation with an Israeli Marxist a different waiter returned. On his tray sat a glass of juice.

'Michael' He called but was met with silence. 'Michael' He shouted again. We all looked at one another. There was no Michael here.
'Michael' The waiter persisted. Still no answer. Then the first waiter arrived. He took the tray from his colleague and bellowed.
'MICHAEL?!'
Michael was no where to be seen. The waiters shrugged at one another as the first waiter said more quietly.
'Michael?'
The two waiters whispered in the half light.

'Excuse me' I said. 'Is that an orange juice?'
'Yes. Michael?' the waiter replied.
'No Sarah although I might look like a Michael but that's definitely my drink.'

The waiter passed me the glass of juice to laughter of stoned Israelis.

A drop of Sherry

I was standing in boots looking at blusher (as if my face wasn't embarrassing enough) when I noticed an old lady bent over her zimmer frame looking at lip stick. How brilliant, I thought that at that age she still wore lipstick.

I was in the queue later and the old women went to counter and asked for some assistance.

'Hello, sorry dear I've forgotten my glasses and I can't find this shade' She pulled out a stick of lipstick from her handbag. The lady behind the counter smiled and said something patronising like;

'Not having a very good day are we?'

I don't know why people insist of saying 'we' instead of 'you' to the ill, injured or infirm.

'No dear' Replied the women, now smiling relieved to have some help.

They walked over to the make up stand and the shop assistant looked at the various different lipsticks. They chatted away like they were old friends, which perhaps they were.

'So' said the shop assistant 'What is the name of this shade?'

'A Drop of Sherry' Replied the old women.

The highlight of my day

I hate the sound of dry felt tip pens on paper. In fact hate is a bit weak; abhor, loathe, despise, I am perhaps even phobic. I don't know why or how it started but I literally can't bear it. If I accidentally find myself writing with a dry felt tip pen my instant reaction is to jump away in horror and contort my body into shapes of disgust, like some people do if they accidentally find a maggot in an apple they are eating or a severed finger in a crisp packet. Everyone has something they can't bare and this is my nails down a blackboard, my cracking of knuckles, my Bono.

Once when I was at work I had to leave the room because one of my colleagues was labelling up an envelope with an old marker pen; my eyes began to water and I excused myself immediately for fear I might vomit.

So, it was to my horror that a few days ago during rush hour, weighed down by bags, unable to move, I sat on the Piccadilly line next to a husband and wife couple who were trying to establish which one of the many highlighters they had in their bag worked.

Dry pen after dry pen was dragged across scrap paper as they tried to draw attention to some sentence or other. They were probably in their sixties and they had more highlighter pens than an average office. This succession and repetition of neon lasted my entire journey, why would they have so many dried up marker pens, and what was so important that they must highlight it now?

My eyes began to water, of all the people they could sit next to, they had to sit next to me, probably the only person on the entire tube network with an irrational fear of dry nibs. I scowled at them as I turned up my ipod, but the scrapping noise penetrated even that. I dug my fingers into the palm of my hands but the pain did nothing to dull the actual pain of being there. They must have wondered why I was tutting and scowling and listening to Canned Heat so loudly. Little did they know or understand what they were putting me through. I gagged twice and the second time coincided with their joy of finding a working highlighter.

I shuddered and huffed and alighted at Finsbury park.

Roadkill

I continue to wobble around the countryside on my 14th birthday present. The main aim of these explorations is to not get fat but also to get out of the house. 

On Saturday I cycled home from my brothers house in Cambridge, I say cycle, stagger would be more accurate. It is about 18 miles and flat all the way which makes it easy but also means there are no downward hills to make you forget what you're doing for a minute. It took me about two hours which I didn't think was too bad and I went the long way round so as to avoid the traffic. At one point I thought I'd discovered a new species of rodent, a massive rat possibly, but then I realised it was a rabbit with his ears back who scampered into a corn field when I approached him.

I have also seen a lot of dead things:

x2 rats

x3 pheasants

x1 deer- so newly dead he would have been alive five minutes earlier.

x1 tail without a body

x1 fox

x loads of hedgehogs but they don't count because they are born to be flattened.

x1 Perfectly decent looking pair of levis discarded in a field. I considered picking them up but then became worried they might be of importance to an impending murder enquiry so left them where they were.

I also saw a mini tornado in a field but that sounds like a lie and so I won't waste my time describing it to you.

Shortly before I fell in to a ditch

Blick-Breeze

I am currently on a break from work (ahem... unemployed) and am staying with my parents in the 'picturesque market town of Saffron Walden'.  Here in the rolling Essex countryside you can admire the 15th century church, buy a portrait of Victoria Beckham (in pastels) for £120 in the local library and then get drunk in Wetherspoons before starting a fight in the street with some squaddies. 

Having now exhausted the options above I am filling my time incrementally, with worthy pursuits, such as; reading, baking, ironing and today I can add to this litany; cycling. 

My dad kindly retrieved my bike from the shed and pumped up the cracked tyres as I dusted it down, screaming loudly whenever  a spider emerged from the mud guard and tried to eat me. The bike was a birthday present for my 14th birthday, and was received all those years ago after rather obsessive research on my part, it is a dusty purple and green Raleigh with twelve gears and a bit of rust. Apart from the ominous squeaking breaks and the cobwebs that had soldered themselves to the handlebars, it is in remarkably good condition given its recent lack of activity.

Having relinquished my membership to the gym and spent the last week eating curries and fry ups (not at the same time) I was long overdue some exercise. I heaved my bike round the side of the house and on to the not-very-mean-at-all streets. I cycled down the road in competition with a teenage boy with ill-advised bleach blond hair and headed out of town, past Audley End House and straight towards the middle of nowhere. 

The middle of nowhere is a nice place to be, bar the M11 that runs a scar across the countryside, the constant swoosh of speeding vehicles is rarely silenced. I rode around the country roads without any kind of map or direction, occasionally singing Beyonce, and thinking about and deciding against a gin and tonic stop. I cycled over the motorway bridge, got mild vertigo and then staggered up a rather steep hill. 

The sharp afternoon sunlight on the chalky soil of the fields made it look like a strange kind of sea, so I stopped to take a picture. I haphazardly left my bike at the side of the road at an odd angle (that prompted one driver to slow right down to check no one had been knocked off it) and jumped over a ditch to find the right angle for the shot. As I took the photo I was dive bombed by a wasp- from a distance I would have appeared to be dancing. The wasp wouldn't leave me alone so I did a strange,wobbly staccato run back to my bike. I leapt over the ditch and looked around for the wasp. I had outrun it. Ha I laugh in the face of you-wasp. I stood there for a second and there was a loud buzzing that hit me on the face, I screamed raised my arms into the air and fell backwards into the ditch. 

As luck would have it the ditch wasn't deep, the wasp did not succeed in stinging me and I had just managed to avoid a cluster of nettles. I jumped up quickly, the road was deserted so my dignity was in tact. As I lifted my bike up from the ground an old lady pulled up beside me. Strangely I was a bit unnerved. Maybe she was an old aged murderer. Instead of cycling away, I waited, just to see if she was. She took quite a long time to get out of the car and I stood there nervously- I just had to know.

"Hello" I said.

"He-low" She replied in an incredibly posh voice.

"Lovely day" I said-this is what people say to each other in the countryside.

"Yeasss, I am just going to see if there are any blick-breeze". That's blackberries to you and I.

She wasn't a murderer.

"Good luck" I said before mounting my bicycle, I looked out for Blick-Breeze, but its near the end of the season and they all looked a bit hopeless so i shouldn't think she was very successful.