Ian McMillan: Spider intrudes in life of cartoon hero
Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you that the preceding paragraph isn’t fantasy. It isn’t a cartoon: it’s my life. It’s what happened to me the other morning, when I was having my breakfast in my dressing gown and slipper socks. I was starving, let me tell you. I could have eaten a horse between two slices of bread. With chips.
I poured the cereals into the bowl with vigour and then I poured some more. I splashed the milk on and plunged the spoon in and my happiness was about to be complete when suddenly I felt a terrible sense of movement in the few scrubby hairs on my chest. I panicked. I whirled my arms and shouted in the manner described. The bowl was flung into the air and it rotated like a satellite orbiting the Earth. Milk and Bran Flakes scattered everywhere in awful guilt-inducing slow motion. Frankly, at that moment I didn’t give a toot because I’d got a spider on me! A spider as big as a scrubbing brush! I could feel its legs tickling me! Please make it go away!
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Hide AdThe funny thing is that I’m not normally that bothered about spiders; It’s just the unexpected arachnid that makes me yelp.
At that point I remembered with a shudder the last time I’d felt a spider crawling all over my flesh. It was a few years ago (but a twinkling of the eye in crawling-spider time). I’d put my pinny on to do the washing up and somehow a spider had been in the pocket and, unknown to me, had crawled out and was creeping up the back of my neck.
I remember my wife saying “You’ve got a spider on you” and I screeched and thrashed at my neck like Basil Fawlty thrashed at that car with that sapling.
And then, back in the present in the kitchen in my dressing gown, I stopped mid-flail as something fell to the floor with a hard noise, the noise a falling spider wouldn’t make.
It was a Bran Flake. A flipping Bran Flake. Not a spider at all. I fell to the floor in humiliation. I curled up into a cringing ball of embarrassment.
I am a cartoon character. My life is a cartoon.