Girlie Morning in Nature

Are spiders actually really stupid? I mean they can spin these beautiful webs, masterpieces of engineering and all that, but are they a bit dim all the same?
This morning I had the first proper dog walk in a week, and Koldbrann and I walked up a remote-ish path where no one had probably been for a while because of the rain. All at once I felt this thing on my arm and it was a spider web (beautiful and a masterpiece of, etc,) stretched out across the path at chest height.

The builder, one of those black and yellow jobbies but quite small so maybe young and stupid, hurried off in the other direction while I was left extracting myself from the sticky net. I thought: what a silly plonker to put the web so low. But for me personally it was actually much better to get caught in a chest height web than a face-height web. As it was, I said nothing and just walked on. I didn’t even swear. That’s for silly girls, not grown women with a purpose, I thought, congratulating myself on my icy calm.

However, when a long snake slithered around my ankle and across my foot a few seconds later, I couldn’t help uttering a strangled yelp. It was just so sudden. Unlike other snakes I have touched, this one was actually cold and slippery, having darted out from the underbrush where a week of constant rain had made for soggy conditions. So, not so icy calm after all, but just a big sissy. Sigh.

蜘蛛 (ji jyu – spider)
蜘蛛網(ji jyu mohng – spider web)
蛇 (seh – snake)

Did you know biophobia (a fear of nature) is a thing? Naturally, it’s quite prevalent in Hong Kong. I made a film about it a few years ago. No, two! Here’s the first. The language explanation is all about yesterday’s article, by the way. That and those.