Monday, January 16, 2012

"Have you ever been mistaken for a man?" "No. Have you?"

There's this terrifying bit in Roald Dahl's Going Solo where he describes working in the desert and being taught to shake his boots for scorpions before putting them on.
I read this at age ten and it has always stayed with me. So much so that for years I have been shaking out my shoes, just in case there were any multipedes in there, ready to destroy my life. I've never shaken out anything more terrifying than a grass seed.
Until yesterday.
I performed my usual shoe-shake ritual: pick up the shoe, shake, bang on ground, visual inspection, shake, bang on ground again (to dislodge anything with grappling hooks), quick poke with hand (why this less dangerous than with a foot is not clear to me), second visual, shake, bang on  ground a third time, then put shoe on. (Repeat with second shoe. Mow lawn. But we're not up to that yet.)
I noticed on the sometimes-used third visual inspection, a particularly stubborn grass seed drop back into the toe of the shoe. A quick hand poke dislodged nothing. On the fourth visual inspection, I saw it, nestled up under the tongue.
A true-blue redback spider.
Yes, after all the hand-poking and shaking and banging and visualising. That thing was probably chasing my big, soft, pink hand out of its huge comfy nest after each poke. It was probably planning an Aliens-style den of terror and venom. I half expected to see Hudson tumbling out of my old sneaker tossing grenades over Ripley's head and squealing 'Game over, man! Game over!'
Then I went around the entire house and lacquered every single spider-sized hidey hole with very toxic bug spray. I would prefer my family died of poisoning than redback spider attack.

Now my feet smell permanently of insect repellent and my years-long shoe ritual just got longer.
Thanks, Roald Dahl. You saved my feet (and possibly my life - it was a pretty big spider).

6 comments:

  1. I'd rather get bitten once than spend 30 seconds every day for 40 years shaking shoes.

    ReplyDelete
  2. How do you guarantee only one bite with no shoe-shaking?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm glad I'm wearing sandals for the forseeable future.
    Did you leave your shoes outside?

    ReplyDelete
  4. I almost never do the shoe shake/inspection thing, I just put them on and trust in luck. So far, so good.
    I have shaken my rubber boots if they've been left outside to dry after gardening, mostly just to shake off the dried mud.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Looki - But then there's the more "frequent" (using the term loosely) occasion when something hard and sharp gets fired out from under the mower, bouncing harmlessly off the enclosed toe of my sneaker. Rather than, say, embedding deeply into my fleshy, uncovered toe ...

    River - Do you spray them too?

    ReplyDelete
  6. I've always been a shoe shaker because my parents made us do it. How funny/strange that it was Roald Dahl who gave you the idea, because Sapphire has just finished reading his book and put it on my bedside table *last night* and said, "You should read this too, Mum."

    And the only good spider is a dead spider, whatever the cost.

    ReplyDelete

An explanation of The Joy Division Litmus Test

Although it may now be lost in the mysts of thyme, the poll below is still relevant to this blog. In the winter of 2008, Mele and I went to live in Queensland. In order to survive, I bluffed my way into a job at a Coffee Club.
It was quite a reasonable place to work: the hours were regular, the staff were quite nice, it wasn't particularly taxing on my brain.
There were a few downsides: In the six weeks or so that I worked there, there was about a 90% staff turnover (contributed to by my leaving). This wasn't seen as a result of the low pay, the laughability of staff prices or the practice of not distributing tips to staff, rather it was blamed on the lack of work ethic among Bribie Island's youth.
However, one of the stranger aspects of the cultural isolation that touched our lives during our time "up there" was the fact that nobody at my work had heard of the band Joy Division.
The full explanation is available here.
But please, interact a little further and vote in my ongoing poll. The results are slowly mounting up, proving one thing: people read this blog are more well-informed about Joy Division than anyone who works at the Coffee Club on Bribie Island.

Have you heard of the band Joy Division?

Chinese food, not Chinese Internet!

Champions of Guess The Header

  • What is Guess The Header about? Let’s ask regular “Writing” reader, Shippy: "Anyway, after Franzy's stunning September, and having a crack at 'Guess The Header' for the first time - without truly knowing what I was doing mind you - I think I finally understand what 'GTH' is all about. At first I thought you needed to actually know what it was. Don't get me wrong — if you know what it is, it may help you. I now realise that it's more Franzy's way of invoking thought around an image or, more often than not, part of an image. If you dissect slightly the GTH explanatory sentence at the bottom of his blog you come up with this: “The photo is always taken by me and always connects in some way to the topic of the blog entry it heads up.” When the header is put up, the blog below it will in some obscure way have something to do with it. “Interesting comments are judged and scored arbitrarily and the process is open to corruption and bribery with all correspondence being entered into after the fact and on into eternity, ad infinitum amen.” Franzy judges it, but it's not always the GTH that describes the place perfectly that gets it. “The frequent commenters, the wits, the wags and the outright smartarses who, each entry, engage to both guess the origin and relevance of the strip of photo at the top (or “head”) of each new blog and also who leave what I deem the most interesting comment.” It generally helps if you're a complete smartarse and can twist things to mean whatever you feel they should mean - exactly the way Franzy would like things to be twisted." - Shippy Blogger and GTH point scorer.
  • Nai - 1
  • Lion Kinsman - 2
  • Will - 2
  • Brocky - 2
  • Andy Pants - 2
  • The 327th Male - 3
  • Mad Cat Lady - 3
  • Miles McClagen - 4
  • Myninjacockle - 4
  • Asheligh - 5
  • Neil - 5
  • Third Cat - 5
  • Adam Y - 6
  • Squib - 6
  • Mele - 6
  • Moifey - 7
  • Jono - 8
  • The Other, other Sam - 14
  • Kath Lockett - 15
  • Shippy - 19
  • River - 32