Toby Young Toby Young

My wife is caught in a web of fear

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Even in my shed at the bottom of the garden I can hear the screams coming from the house. Shrieks of pure terror, often sustained for several seconds, followed by desperate cries for help. No, my family’s not being assailed by a serial killer. Spider season is here and Caroline is an arachnophobe.

One a scale of one to ten, I’d give her about an eight on the irrationality scale. She doesn’t insist that I search every nook and cranny of our bedroom to make sure it’s spider-free before she can go to sleep. But she has surrounded the bed with conkers. She’s a great believer in the spider-repelling properties of horse chestnuts, even though there’s no scientific evidence for it.

When we first got together and I discovered this phobia I made the mistake of asking her what she was scared off. ‘Being bitten of course,’ she said. I assured her that the chances of being bitten by an English house spider are vanishing to zero, but she looked at me as if I was a paid agent of the Spider King. ‘What d’you think that is, then?’ she said, jabbing her finger at an almost invisible red spot on her leg. And that’s not the only reason to fear arachnids. As any fule kno, they can also crawl into your ear or mouth when you’re asleep and lay eggs which then hatch a few days later, producing an eruption of baby spiders.

According to Freud, arachnophobia is rooted in a person’s fear of being smothered by their mother

Paradoxically, she also wildly inflates the size of house spiders, making an unnoticed invasion of a body cavity quite unlikely. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been summoned to the bedroom to deal with one ‘the size of a dinner plate’, only to be confronted with a creature no bigger than my fingernail.

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