Because I have been having fun and adventuring around England!
Here's a brief overview of the past week:
- Giant spider under my bed has been slain.
- Did a walking tour of Cambridge with Paul and saw a bunch of colleges on Friday
- Went to Audley End House and London for a BBC Prom on Saturday
- Sunday I did another half-day in London
- Monday I went to London and saw Hamlet with Benedict Cumberbatch, then returned to Cambridge Tuesday afternoon to help move into a new flat
- I went to Brighton on Wednesday
- Thursday I met with a friend in London for breakfast/brunch, then returned to Cambridge for a showing of Avenue Q
And today I'm kicking back and catching up while simultaneously doing laundry. Also recovering a bit because I haven't walked less than ten miles a day since I started going out and about. Ow my feet.
I'll start cranking out blog posts over the next day to review the stuff above in greater detail. I can tell you about the spider now though, since that's short and won't take much time.
The spider, as noted above, had been slain. The flatmate who let me borrow the duvet came down and looked everywhere for a spider, found one, and then killed it. I didn't see which one they had killed so I was a little suspicious but I was still happy the flat had one less spider in it.
My best guess is that the spider had moved to a little gap between the stairs and the carpet and had been hiding there while I was looking through the bedding. When I came back down the stairs later the original spider was startled and then scuttled across the room to hide under my luggage. Delightful.
I called down Paul who was able to actually kill it for real with one of my shoes and I could safely sleep downstairs again.
My best guess, after researching different kinds of common house spiders, is that it was probably a cardinal spider:
The website that I found this info on (although I'm having trouble finding it now - sorry) said that "Although they are mainly thought to be harmless to humans, these arachnids get a bad reputation because of their huge size, incredible speed and their nocturnal habits."
Given that this giant thing practically flew around the kitchen at 2am, I'm gonna say that this is a pretty safe guess.
That's all for this post - I'll keep posting updates throughout the rest of my day off. Stay tuned!
