London has the biggest spiders in the world.

Why didn’t anyone tell us this?

Yesterday, we went with the more expensive one-bedroom apartment, by the way, closer to all the amenities, for our new permanent house-hold. After closing the deal, we were as excited and giddy as new homeowners who do not own a new home.

But upon returning to our tiny temporary quarters…

… on the wall …

… sat …

… stood? …

… no, sat, I think … like the one who sat by Little Miss Muffet …

… a tarantula as big as a frisbee.

I could have been a tarantula. It might have been a banana spider.

In any case it was gigantic. And brown and hairy. So big and brown and hairy that I assumed it must have come, via our luggage, from the deep California desert.

It lurked at the bottom of the wall, near the baseboard, like some fallen, macrame wall-hanging. Except this fallen, macrame wall-hanging could at any moment leap onto your face and suck the life from you with its sixteen sets of razor sharp pedipalps.

There were no pauses to reflect upon the sanctity of all life, the need to honor and love all sentient beings. No, no. There was screaming, confusion, and commands – shouted simultaneously by Janet and myself, each to the other, to kill the thing at once. Janet has rank on me, so I was the one deployed to the actual combat theater (aka “theatre”).

It took a while to select the appropriate killing machine. The thing with moving to another continent is that you don’t pack many things your willing to get spider guts on. You’ve left things like that back home in the trash.

My Internet research suggests that the beast might have been a House Spider (Steatoda grossa). I however have decided to name it Spider Of Shrieking Maelstrom Of Doom (Spiderdoomius shriekius).

Do not make the same mistake we have made. I beg you …

… Avoid England at all costs. Do not land. Here be dragons.