… or how I learned to stop worrying and live with arachnids.

I’m spending Christmas and New Year’s in Johannesburg with my sister and her family and I have my own chalet while I’m here, complete with kitchen and en suite bathroom.
Already, I’ve found a dead scorpion on the floor, presumably killed by me when I went to use the toilet (I was wearing shoes at the time, I hasten to add):

Now, that’s one silhouette nobody wants to see when they get up in the morning …
The scary thing is, whenever I tell someone about it, they always ask if it was brown or black. I’ve still not found out which one is the more deadly … I think my one’s brown, but you tell me …

However, the interesting thing is that although I’m a lifelong arachnophobe, all of a sudden, I don’t seem to mind spiders anymore. It may be because of the scorpion, or it may simply be because there are so many of the damn things where I’m staying that there’s not much point in worrying about them anymore. They’re in the shower with me, they’re by my bed, they’re all over the walls, they’re behind the curtains … in short, there must be hundreds of the buggers in my room alone.

But … I don’t mind. They don’t bug me so I don’t kill them anymore. I have to admit I used to take a shoe to them whenever I saw one at home, but over here they don’t bother humans: they just want to eat flies and mosquitoes, so really they’re doing me a favour.

Here’s a few of my friends: