Have you ever resuscitated a spider? I must confess that I certainly hadn’t – until this morning…

I was happily rinsing a plate in the kitchen sink and when I turned off the tap I noticed a daddy-long-legs in the drain, feebly witching after an inadvertant sluicing. Feeling mortified I used a tea towel to carefully lift it out of the sink. Although it looked in a bad way I could see a leg move now and then so I left it on the tea towel to dry, carefully rearranging its legs as four of them had become stuck together, two of them actually intertwined. Finally it had all its legs in the right place and was looking more like a spider should and not as distressed. (Don’t ask me to describe a distressed spider just take my word that you can tell when an arachnid is in trouble). I kept an eye on him until we went out and he sat there on the tea towel beside the sink occasionally waving a leg to show he was still alive. When we came back from our outing he was gone and I later saw him on the kitchen window, seemingly recovered from his accidental drowning. The next day I found a spider leg on the kitchen bench and thought perhaps he had been attacked by another spider (of which there were quite a number in the studio) and killed but later that day I saw a daddy-long-legs on the ceiling and it only had seven legs! So, my patient had obviously suffered trauma to one of his legs and lost or shed it, but now is happily scuttling about Lann Dearg’s studio one fully recovered. Hopefully the next tenants won’t squash him with a shoe!! Maybe I should have left a note.