Outside Context

Trav­el­ling in the hot­ter parts of the world brings you face to face with all sorts of creatures that you’re not used to. For an Eng­lish­man, nor­mally to be found in the com­pany of noth­ing more excit­ing than a fox or a cow, sud­denly com­ing in con­tact with everything from camels to alpacas can be daunt­ing. Faced with close encoun­ters with Aus­tralian sharks & Kangaroos, the wild dogs of India, the snakes of Laos and the ele­phants of Thai­l­and one’s view of the world is chal­lenged and you are taken right out of your com­fort zone. But, noth­ing pre­pares you for hav­ing to face a creature that you are nor­mally adverse to. I left Eng­land with one par­tic­u­lar animal dis­like; that of spiders.

I’m not sure what they have done to deserve it, but it seems almost instinct­ive. I just cant stand them. They give me the impres­sion of being unhappy, of being mean, of being viol­ent. Spiders in the UK may not be able to enven­o­mate a human, but that doesn’t stop them from try­ing. I have been bit­ten by an Eng­lish spider, and it was a little shock­ing to actu­ally feel it. I hoped I wouldn’t be bit­ten by any on my travels. I trace my fear back to my early teens where a nest of the little blight­ers was on the wall in my room and I awoke to find myself crawl­ing with them. But, if I am hon­est with myself, it goes back fur­ther than that. I vividly recall, at the age of 6, burst­ing into tears when my mother gave me a wind-up spider as a Christ­mas present. It is amaz­ing that a child­hood memory can trig­ger a cer­tain response; that of wrath. You see, I am not so much afraid of spiders, than that I have to kill them when they are present. In Eng­land this usu­ally amounts to a fen­cing lunge while wear­ing shoes, or the ser­vices of a cat, but Eng­lish spiders are gen­er­ally small; what is to be done when the spider is bigger?

The cor­rect way to con­quer a fear is to face it down. This worked with my child­hood fear of the dark, which I cured by lock­ing myself in the air­ing cup­board. It also worked with my fear of heights by my jump­ing off the highest bun­gee in New Zea­l­and. Sit­ting here now, can I say the fol­low­ing tales have cured me of a fear of spiders? I will leave that to the end of the art­icle, after my memory has dis­gorged these tales.

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