I'm not really a spider, honest...

As I sit here, wiping the sleep from my eyes, trying to spark my weary brain to action, it's about 192 hours since I last did this. Incidentally, 192 hours is according to a survey conducted by the Express newspaper, the amount of time we all waste per year. That includes at 31 per cent, waiting for slow computers to boot-up.

That French geezer who wrote a bit himself, Victor Hugo once said "Short as life is, we make it shorter by the careless waste of time". He also said "Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come" and I have an idea, and so...

Much to my surprise, my Large White butterflies have started emerging. I have some caterpillars in my studio too (more of that in a future update) and I guess that the temperature I am keeping those at was just a tad too hot for the chrysalises. I suspected a few might be close to eclosing when I spotted the one in the photograph below. The wing spots are already quite distinctive...   

Isn't it annoying how mobile phones rule us! Not only alerting us to every minutia of our lives, but demanding we pick them up to answer immediately. I had been observing this chrysalis for at least a couple of hours, hoping to catch the moment it metamorphosed, when my phone summoned me with a knock, knock. I was distracted for no more than two minutes, when I turned back, it was already half way out! 

Oh well, here it is anyway, at least I got to photo it...

I determined that it wouldn't happen again and so I removed the temptation by leaving my phone in the house whilst I watched another for signs of new life. This time I did better. Not perfect, but better. I could have done with being a little further away really, so that it was still all in shot but at least I get to share what I recorded here.

Watch for the point at about 0:49 where the meconium is expelled. Meconium is the reddish fluid that butterflies expel when they emerge from their chrysalises. It’s a waste product left over from metamorphosis. Also right at the end, it struggles to free one wing from the empty casing...

And then a short video showing it expanding its wings...




Finally a shot of it resting before being released...

I think that the four, yes four have now emerged, were all females. Could that be significant? The other thing that struck me was that I had two colourways of these and it is the green ones that are left: not a single green one eclosed.

I wasn't able to release the first to emerge, the weather was just not good enough. I kept them inside my studio in the garden and allowed them to fly free overnight if they wished. I also provided a sugar-water drink and a sprig of Buddleia should they want to feed.

Luckily the weather the following day was much better, as were temperatures, and so I was able to release them all and watch them fly off. Was it just coincidence I wonder that they all flew to the South East of the garden? 

Something a little different to complete this blog-update. I recently submitted 2 pieces of work for publication, the idea being that it gave the publishers a choice between the two. Having chosen, it left me wondering what to do with the one not chosen and so I thought, why not use it here, rather than leave it unread and unused.

Here it is then...

“The ghost of a spider” 

It was January of 1963 and although we didn’t realise it at the time, we were experiencing what would become the coldest British winter since records began. At Herne Bay, the sea froze for a mile out from the shore: it also froze inland in places, removing the last chance of food for many inland water birds.

At home it was mightily cold too, with temperatures indoors only marginally above those outdoors in the snow.

 Central heating had been used in some select homes since the mid-1800s but it wasn’t for the likes of we plebs. Memory tells me that the house was heated on the ground floor by an open fire, and a Rayburn cast-iron range cooker; upstairs there was no heat source whatsoever, nothing to prevent the frost from forming on the inside of the windows, as it often would in wintertime. Even so, on this particular night I was anticipating bedtime nicely. My pyjamas had been warming on the towel rail at the front of the cooker, ready for me to climb into after ‘my turn’ in the bath, and the stone hot water bottle was already airing my bed. Best of all, dad who was a bit of a Jack-of-all-trades, had installed his latest creation, a set of bunk beds (I shared with my brother) and tonight was to be the inaugural sleep on my choice of the top bunk.

 Yet it wasn’t a wholehearted acceptance of bedtime, there were a couple of reservations uppermost in my mind. There was the omnipresent threat of the terrors: nightmares! By the tender age of 12 they had already become a staple of my nights. Then there was ‘The Thing’, the physical embodiment of nightmares. It hung there in the corner of the room, just below the ceiling, taunting me, making eye contact, threatening to invade my already angst-ridden dream-time and who knows what else it might be capable of should I avert my gaze for even a millisecond. Gossamer thin, opaque at a distance, becoming more translucent should I dare to creep closer: ghostly! In fact such was its form that I had christened it ‘the ghost of a spider’. I had already asked mother if she could banish the ghost of a spider from the bedroom, and by association, my dreams, but my request was met with a curt, “You know I hate spiders, ask your father”.

 I plucked up enough courage to broach the subject that same night, right after he’d admonished me for “that racket” he insisted I was making by trying to play ‘Foot Tapper’ on my Stylophone. I tried to explain as best I could that the tune was one of ‘The Shadows’ finest and my rendition was top-notch, and anyway Stylophones wouldn’t be invented until 1967. “Surrealism isn’t even your prime peculiarity” was his retort; followed by “get yourself off to bed and let’s hear no more about the ghost of a spider, you are almost an adult now start behaving like one”.

 As I ascended the wooden ladder of gloom to my lofty berth, I determined to sleep at the foot-end of the bed. That way the ghost of a spider would at least have to travel a fair way before it could nosedive on its silken thread, pausing only when we were eye to eye, to eye, to eye, to eye to… scare the living B-Jesus out of me. I slithered under the covers as best I could, my chilblains stung as my toes found the water bottle, covering my head with a pillow I drifted off into the best night’s sleep in a very long time. When daylight pierced a gap in the curtains and drew patterns on the wall through Jack Frost’s graffiti on the windows, there in the corner was the ghost of a spider.

 Wiping the sleep from my eyes I crawled to ‘his end’ of the bed. “Today you will become a man” I whispered, almost convincingly to myself. I raised myself up to my full, manly height, all the time trying to avoid stepping on the bottom of my sagging PJs, until me and the ghost of a spider were face to face. Fearlessly, I thrust out my right hand, expecting him to run for his life; instead he remained motionless and so using my first finger and thumb in a pincer movement, I plucked him from his ivory tower. What an anti-climax: he was nothing more than a spider moult. I had been terrorising myself for so long over an inanimate object.

 As with most lessons in life, it had its upside though. Now that I was officially a man, that school bully was about to feel the wrath of my new found confidence. 

If you find yourself anticipating another update 192 hours from now, then apparently to find out exactly when that will be, you need to divide 192 by 24 and then round it down to the nearest whole number, then add that number of days to today's date.