A Spider Amongst the Saints

A Restless Weekend

The quest for sufficient sleep is one goal that defines my weekends; the pall of nocturnal insomnia hangs over my weekday nights and threatens my efficiency and productivity at work.

Just as I was considering a lie-in on Sunday, I had a date in mind a week hence, when I was scheduled to read the second lesson in church. Just to be sure, I checked the rota, and it was for today.

I have gained more confidence to read publicly, with my voice regaining some timbre for short periods of time.

A Fright by Email

However, it was another email that gave me the fright. We were being invited to a "Celebration of Gratitude", which read rather like a "Celebration of Life", a confusion between a demise and a departure; we were seeing off a lady who had a long-standing relationship with the church, as she moved to a home in Cumbria.

The sender, an Englishman, should have known better, having received a note from someone who speaks English as a foreign language, and obviously, once we read the content of the email, we were better informed.

After I had read the lesson, with a slight hiccup where I corrected myself, saying "through" instead of "though", the service progressed to the serving of communion.

The Uninvited Guest

Then a creepy-crawly came down the aisle, its body about a centimetre square and its legs at least seven centimetres each; a spider unlike any you see at home.

People attending church for the fear of God were soon gripped by arachnophobia.

A man of the cloth boldly lifted his feet off the floor and onto the seats, obviously not to harm the spider, or perhaps he was one of the ilk of Little Miss Muffet, who is famed for the eponymous nursery rhyme.

Calm Restored

Then a lady of the sterner kind, with the cojones that men pretend they possess, picked up the spider with a piece of tissue paper, dropped it, but scooped it up again and relocated it outside to the church gardens.

Calm and peace settled on that side of the congregation, as we deigned not to point fingers at the affrighted.

The celebration after the service was a generous buffet, with applause from us all, bidding her godspeed and new friendships at the home by the sea.

A Google NotebookLM AI Podcast on this blog

Thought Picnic: The tracks of a spider on my skin

Lumbered out of slumber

I have not accepted the fact that I probably suffer from insomnia even though some close friends have observed my erratic sleeping patterns.

My pill time is usually in the 2-hour window between 23:00 hours and 01:00 hours, suggesting I am awake until about 02:00 hours in the morning.

Once I am in bed, I polish off a few tweets, sometimes I get into a scrap many will consider rank floccinaucinihilipilification, but that is part of making light of a long day.

Sounds for bounds

Some music, a teaching, or audio lectures become the background sound of my descent into slumber that rarely stretches beyond 3 hours, if I do not wake up at least once in that period.

However, I have learnt to sleep with no background sounds and eliminated the fear of my mind wandering too far for me to control; the nightmares that feast on the agitated seeds of my imagination.

Lights, I still need, and that story is longer than I have time to tell or write about. I have somewhat found a way to sleep short, but rest well, even if I could do with a lot more sleep.

After my second short session of sleep that brought the dawning of the day, I said a little prayer and rolled over to interact with my social media community.

Derma arachnida

I felt a tingling itch asking for a scratch on my arm. And there, between the rational that saw a spider and the split second of the reflex of a flailed arm of its disappearance onto the camouflaged protection of the carpet; I realised I did not have enough information to ask for an antidote if I had been stung by the spider.

I guess that sometimes defines how we react to circumstances. The information we have acquired in the split second that requires the patience of another few seconds to make rational decisions based on getting better informed is lost to reflex and reaction that you are left none the wiser about the experience.

Surely, my spider moment is no exercise in floccinaucinihilipilification, is it?

Squirrels grabbing my nuts

The Spider's web

I walked into my main bedroom, looked up and sighted a large cobweb, as I tried to take it down; I had to be sure there were no tripwires in the web that could set off alarms at the spying headquarters of the spider empire.

Apparently, my competitors had outsourced the job of spying to this colony of spiders that unbeknownst to me were recording and transmitting information to places unknown. Eight-legged with hundreds of eyes - I have to be careful.

The spiders have somehow fanned out through the house, but since the rendezvous point has been tampered with, I believe the spiders would not be able to upload the information to the spy headquarters and as they expend energy in rebuilding the network, their memory banks would be exhausted leaving me temporarily save from unwarranted espionage.

Animal spy

Living on the 7^th floor, I have found that the spy network have not be able to engage mosquitoes in their nefarious activities, the thought of spies sucking blood at night for research purposes is scary enough.

Before you look out to see if it is that time for the maximum effect of the lunar cycle, the Iranians captured 14 squirrels that had the outsourced contract for spying on Iran.

It would appear they were employed by the Zionists and Great Satan - Tut! Tut! They must be nuts, but could it be the Iranian nuts or the Iranians that are nuts?

However, before this madness beclouds our sensibilities, pigeons have delivered intelligence, chickens have searched out chemical contamination and dolphins have sought out underwater mines.

Ah! The dog comes round for a stroking - Fetch!