The Monday Muse. New year, same old fear.

I wish I could make a new year’s resolution to ditch the arachnophobia and start 2016 as a spider lover. Unfortunately it is not that simple. Here’s a little tale of how my Saturday morning was spent, with a spider. Happy new year.

Five cm.

It was the first time the boy had left the house without me since Christmas. It was no less than ten minutes after his departure – while I was sat indulging in some festive telly – that the eight legged brute creeped across the hallway like it owned the place.

To be fair, it now did.

I mustered up all strength to flatten it with a shoebox. It did a vanishing act. Distressed phone calls were made. I sat for two hours. Staring at the vacant space.

I was bound to my bedroom, all five feet two of my coward body disarmed whilst that five centimetres of audacity paraded around my house at will.

I’d admire their chutzpah, if only I didn’t hate them so much.

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Sharpen.

Happy new year to my lovely readers, I hope your last few weeks have been filled with a little indulgence of all kinds. In racking my brains this morning for a New Year’s post I ventured down this nostalgic path…

Sharpen.

Mechanical pencils are very often my weapon of choice, owing to many childhood years spent amidst shattered splinters of sharpenings and lead smears across my fingers and exercise book pages, but this morning, jutting from the hefty white ceramic fist that sits on my desk grasping my writing tools, a sliver of gold caught my eye.

Digging out a plastic sharpener in faded fuchsia from the bottom of my desk drawers, I gave this metallic sheathed scribbler its very first gasp of life. It shed its lustrous skin whilst the smell of wood shavings and lead scuffled up my New Year’s flu blocked nose and struck a chord in my brain that resonated with my eleven year old self, sharpening pencils in a blue diplodocus desk tidy that my Dad had purchased because I had a penchant for dinosaurs and it was obviously with much hilarity that one could sharpen their pencils in an extinct reptile’s bottom.

Once I’d grounded myself from my nostalgic wondering, I noticed the sharpenings had spiralled into a golden fringed crown… a regal start to the year.