I'm a big scaredy cat really!

I’m not great with any type of bug or anything that slithers, crawls or buzzes. I’m not sure what it is. I don’t have a phobia but when I see an insect, I become the ultimate girl and tend to run around, flapping my arms, expecting someone to come and rescue me.

I was at my aunt’s house one night and we were sitting in the kitchen, when a spider the size of a dinner plate (well, slight exaggeration, the size of a saucer then) ran across the floor straight towards, I swear I could see its fangs and the glint in its eye when it thought it had me cornered.

As some of you know, I am not the most athletic person, but I was across the room and up on the counter in about 0.5 seconds. By this point my aunt was almost hysterical with laughter, but eventually recovered enough to help and removed the monster.

There was also the time that the cousin of the previous spider followed me to work. There I was in a meeting with a client when I saw it leering at me from under a side table. Luckily I know this client well and he is used to me acting strangely at times, so he thought nothing of me conducting the rest of the session crouched up on my chair (Tom Cruise stylee for those who saw that interview!).

But it’s not just limited to spiders. When I was 17, I went camping in Cornwall with a friend and her family. We had hit the onsite ‘club’ (I use that term very loosely) and had crawled back to our tent a while after everyone else. It was as I was getting into my sleeping bag when I noticed two glowing eyes peering at us from the nearby dunes. In my head, what was more than likely a harmless grass snake (if it was a snake at all!) turned into a monster python, escaped from a local zoo. The fear (yes, combined with a decent amount of alcohol!) meant that my friend and I spent the night facing the tent door, torches trained on the opening, prepared to defend ourselves. I’m still not entirely sure what we thought we would have done, but we were prepared to do battle anyway!

I know logically that it is incredibly unlikely that one of these beasts will hurt me in any way. The most that will happen will be that they will crawl on me, I’ll scream and make an idiot of myself, which I’m used to anyway. I just can’t seem to control this feeling that one day I will be eaten by a new species of monster insect.