It’s November. I don’t expect to see them this close to winter…

Remember the little girl in the film Aliens? She warns Sigourney Weaver that “they mostly come out at night… mostly.”.

Well, in my case, I would advise “they mostly come out between August and October, which is widely considered to be their mating season… mostly.”

If you haven’t realised by now, I am, of course, referring to spiders.

While waiting patiently for my wife to finish in the bathroom, I saw it. A big, black, hairy spider crawl out from under the toilet rolls. I shouted. Claire screamed. I cowered. Claire heroically caught the creature in a plastic cup and threw it out of the window.

Don’t worry – only the spider was chucked out. The plastic cup was not. I’ve seen Blue Planet 2 and don’t want to get into trouble with David Attenborough, for killing a dolphin.

That spider had no business terrorising us. While I hate the things, I have reluctantly learnt to accept that they probably serve a purpose in the eco-system, besides scaring wimps like me.

If nursery rhymes about carnivorous old women have taught us nothing, it’s that spiders catch flies. So without them, we would be overrun with blue bottles and worse still, Jeff Goldblum (kids – this is a 1980s movie reference).

To continue doing their job, they need to breed. I know all about the bird and the bees. Pretty ironic, considering the old woman in the rhyme, swallowed a bird to catch a spider.

While I therefore allow spiders to exist during their mating season, I find it totally unacceptable that they should live, and especially fornicate, outside of their allotted time.

Where the hell am I going with this blog? What the fudge am I even writing about?

This spider may well have been hibernating before today. It certainly looked colder and slower, as it ran towards my wife on the toilet.

We have an excellent cleaner, who visits our house every Tuesday for a couple of hours, to make our home look nice.

Today, it looks like she must have moved my bedside cabinet, to clean behind it. This has left me with a horrific thought…

What if the spider had been hibernating behind my bedside cabinet? My BEDSIDE cabinet? This means that I could have been sleeping next to the beast for ages!

To think, my Mum, Dad, and in recent years, Claire, told me that there are no monsters living under my bed. This was pretty damn close!