Tuesday 10 June 2014

My Name is Mud

I may have cause a bit of an incident on the M25 last week, so this blog is by way of an apology.

Once again it was time for our annual sojourn of being homeless. We packed filled the car with tents and camping gear to the point it groaned when we pulled away, and headed away from the driest county in England, to the wettest county in England. The one you see on the news with cars being washed away, pensioners sitting on their roof in their nightwear, and people commuting by inflatable dinghies. You know the one.

The incident itself occurred  as we were on a rare stretch of the M25 that was actually moving. Admittedly moving at the speed of continental drift, but moving none the less. I was fiddling with the radio trying to find something other than Classic FM to listen when a spider about the size of my head* crawled out of the air vent in front of me and signaled it's intent to make the next few minutes of my life as stressful as possible. My reaction to this was to take a sharp intake of breath and attempt to get into the back of the car. Fortunately for everyone involved, I wasn't driving at the time (although if I had been, I still would have tried to climb into the back).

"Sp-sp-sp-sp!"

I said, manfully. The Wife glanced across and said, quite wrongly;

"It's only tiny!"

And then;

"Man up!"

I did as instructed and, in the style of someone defusing a bomb, lowered the window as it crawled along the top of the door. The spider paused, looked at me with all eight eyes and, in a very deliberate movement that only I could see, drew a line across it's throat and pointed at me. 

"It wants to kill me!"

I screamed, rationally. The Wife rolled her eyes, leant across me (not easy as I was still trying to get in the back seat) and tried to brush it out of the window. We changed lanes a little. She stopped trying.

Frantically I looked around for something to use to push it out of the window and found, of all things, a pair of bananas, connected at the text, in the picnic bag at my feet.

Like Errol Flynn I wielded the bananas yelling;

"AHA YOU BASTARD!"

And swung at the evil little thing - just in time as it was pulling a tiny knife out to jab at me. There was a thud and, well, I missed. Not only did I miss, but my mighty swing had detached one of the bananas. This flew in a short arc out of the window, across the M25 and through the open window of a rather surprised woman alongside us, finally ending up somewhere in the passenger side of the car. Now, it would have been quite cool if the woman in the car next to us had done a Dani Alves and cheekily eaten the banana. Perhaps with a little wave and toot of the horn. Instead she started shouting. A lot.

"Did you get it?"

"Noooo... Now we have one less banana, that women is shouting at me and there's still a spider in the car."

"What the hell is going on?"

The Boy asked.

"Where's the spider?"

The answer was; no where to be seen. Eventually we lost the woman, but I still had to spend another three hours in a car with a deadly spider ready to pounce - ever fearful the thing was just above my head and the only way I could get away from it was to open the door and roll out into the road.


* It was. Totally. No exaggeration. It definitely wasn't about the size of my thumb nail because I would have dealt with it like a man, not a wet lettuce.