World Wide Webs

Every morning, as I leave for work and walk out of the front door, I spend some seconds peering in the dark at the frame of my parents' porch. I look for the latest arch enemy in my life, it can have a seriously bad effect on a whole day for me and there really aren't many things that I can say that about.

As I squint into the darkness and try to focus I often spy the enemy and make a split second decision on how I'm going to leave the house without being assaulted and smothered.

Yes, it's a spiderweb.

For the last two weeks I've bowled out of the house with a spring in my step, laughter in my heart and that usual itch in my pants and promptly walked straight through the web. Like one of those primitive animals that doesn't learn from its mistakes, I've slept the night and forgotten that the web would be there, in the same place as it was the previous morning.

It must be a bit of a bummer to be a spider. You're intelligent and smart enough to build webs that are so strong and perfect in terms of engineering they can catch fully grown elephants. But you don't have the brain power to think that there's something fundamentally unproductive in building one in exactly the same place every night because some idiot carrying a brief case destroys it each morning. Imagine having a memory that erases itself every so often, it must be terrible.

I've come to the conclusion that there's nothing worse than that cobweb in your hair feeling but I can't figure out exactly why. It's only small and thin this web material but one strand of it in my hair makes me feel as if I'm trapped in a pit full of snakes while wearing a suit made of snake food and told not to move and definitely not to play the drum kit in the pit with me. The only thing worse would be if Jennifer Aniston was naked on the other side of the pit and in the mood for some drummer love.

I spend my whole day attempting to get the web out of my hair and my mind imagines things that frankly are a waste of imagination time. Like flies, insects and spiders crawling around my head and eggs being hatched in the deep recesses of my hair, not that I have any deep recesses in my hair nowadays. Every so often I feel a bit of web somewhere on my head, but it's never to be found. Plenty of moving hair around with the hand type of activity usually only succeeds in messing up my hair and removing that morning's hair product. Not good.

My feelings of empathy and sympathy for the average fly that gets caught in a web are big and flowing. I know exactly how it must feel for the chaps and will be happy to lend them some hair product if they apply through the usual channels. At certain points in the day I look like one of those chaps fighting off a swarm of invisible flies, as I try to nonchalantly rid my head of the web that I know is in there.

I've now come up with a plan. It's usually dark as I exit the house but I've sussed out this particular spider's game. The web is always there in the very same corner of the porch and I cunningly and cleverly stoop and swerve, like a top class rugby player evading a tackle, as I leave the house.

If anyone sees me doing this they would probably think I look like some sort of twitching weirdo. It's usually about six in the morning and they would witness me crouching low and bending my body from the waist to the right. On particularly joyful mornings I might even incorporate a spin into the routine, though that leaves me in danger of falling into one of the plants, or pulling something.

Every few days I forget to do this though and get trapped. Not literally of course, I don't spend hours stuck in the web waiting for a casual passer by to rush in and help me out before the massive scary spider comes and eats me. No, that was just in a dream I had.

But is it just me or does everyone hate that spiderwebby feeling?