Shining tumbling water

I saw another huntsman spider. It was hiding in between the cushion and the frame of the sofa, and although it clearly just wanted to stay in that space and not bother anyone, that is obviously not allowed because big spiders do not have that kind of freedom. Big spiders should be outside. I’m all for human/spider segregation. I don’t want them in my schools or my swimming pools. I want them out.

I saw this spider in Katoomba, a picturesque town in the Blue Mountains. It’s probably the most touristy one because it’s the one closest to the Three Sisters, three towers of rock - they probably have a grander geological term - that are known to the layman as “pretty rad”. 

It’s about two hours west of central Sydney by train, and is usually not as hot as central Sydney. Of course, when we went, it was as hot as central Sydney. This mini heatwave meant we hiked around in temperatures in the high thirties and although I know I will garner no sympathy from those of you in the northern hemisphere, I did get my comeuppance.

My blood is incredibly delicious. This isn’t the kind of thing they tell you when you give blood (the only thing I learned the one time I did that several years ago is that they ask women “have you ever had sex with a man who’s had sex with another man?” which they presumably usually have to answer with “I don’t think so…?”). I realised that my blood was delicious when I went to California in 2011, and went hiking with a Californian. She didn’t know that mosquitoes came out at that time of year – they’d never bothered her when she’d hiked there before – but I came out with 55 bites on my left leg alone. My curse has not lifted since. I have bites on my legs and feet and arms and neck and elbows and wrists. (Thankfully – though somewhat backhanded-complimentedly – insects don’t seem to like my face.) So we hiked and I got bitten and I sweated out most of the water in my body and I saw a big spider. Great fun, but I am currently very itchy; that kind of directionless itchiness that you know you shouldn’t solve with scratching, so you rub your bites against the duvet or something because at least you’re not scratching the bites with your fingernails that way. That kind of directionless itchiness that, if I were a dog, I’d solve by dragging my bum across the floor.

On the way back from Katoomba I ended up sitting opposite a nice Australian lady on the train who lived in Lithgow, further out in the bush, who regaled me with tales of how she has to check the kids’ beds and sandpit for the presence of redback spiders, stupid spiders that, of course, are very poisonous. (Michaela, one of the Aussie contingent at my Christmas job, said that they used to get them on the tables and chairs in her primary school, and they just had to tell the teacher so that they’d get rid of them. The most dangerous thing I remember seeing at primary school was a battery that had been sitting in the sun which we all dared each other to touch. It was hot, but I don’t think it bit any of us.)

(Incidentally, I’ve got the TV on. In award-nominated Puberty Blues, one girl said to her mum “I do hate you! And I’ll hate you forever!” Later one of her friends ate a guy’s pie and he got angry and kicked her but she didn’t defend her. Right now her dad appears to have grounded her – at least I think that’s what he means when he says she’s “gated” for a month.)

Now I’m in Sydney I am back to seeing the kinds of people that only big cities have to offer. I was at the bus stop earlier, on the phone to Rachael, when some frantic vagabond yelled at me “WHEN IS THE NEXT 144?!”. I said I didn’t know, but he said “BUT THE TIMETABLE IS RIGHT THERE SO TELL ME, WHEN IS THE NEXT 144?!”. I told him but Rachael thought I was talking to her, but I couldn’t really explain that I was next to a mental who was getting steadily more angry at me for not being able to read a type of timetable that I’ve never had to read before.

In addition to the classic “unhinged man on the street” kind of mental, I also met a mental at a viewing of a house. Rachael couldn’t come because she was caught up at a different one, so I had the pleasure of doing this one on my own. I said to the French lady who owned it that I said I’d take some pictures for Rachael, but she said there was no point because all the photos were on the advert and she was renovating anyway. She then told me that she didn’t really want two friends moving in because they’d probably just hang out with each other rather than her. When she asked what work we wanted to pursue, I said rather vaguely that I wanted to pursue something in education and she took this to mean that the area was probably inconvenient for me, I think based purely on the fact that she couldn’t think of a place nearby where I might want to work. “Obviously that doesn’t mean that I’d say no if you were interested in living here…” she said, convincingly. She recommended I live in Redfern which, from what I can tell from what every single person in Sydney thinks, is perhaps the worst suburb in Sydney. I’m not sure I was her kind of person.

Then we went downstairs and we saw the cat that sometimes comes and eats food in her kitchen, but it was on the table so she whacked it with an empty water bottle.

Fuck her.