This plague of flies is a fairly recent phenomenon. Ever since I can remember, we have had spiders in this house, and I don’t just mean little money spiders: I am talking about the chunky ones with legs at least 3cm long. I don’t think a day goes by without me seeing at least one somewhere in the house. Maybe I should have got spider spray instead of fly spray.

Now I have to admit that I am a bit of a girlie when it comes to spiders, so I am quite surprised how well I am coping here. A few years ago if I saw a big spider indoors I would go and get a glass straight away and try to catch it and evict it. I did not want it to go and hide so it could pop out while I slept and crawl all over me. If I knew there was one of the big buggers in the room hidden somewhere I could never really relax.

Now I am – by my standards – quite OK with them. I am not likely to pick one up, and if one scuttled over my bare foot, or any other part, I would probably have a panic attack, but I can sit at the table with a category 2 or 3 (on the Phill Jupitus scale of measuring spiders) on the wall within a metre and more or less ignore it. The rest of the time I just live happily in denial.

There are, however, two things I don’t understand. Firstly, we have hardly any cobwebs in the house now. Before we decorated they were everywhere, but now there are none, and with the newly clean walls and ceilings they would be very noticeable. The real question, though, is this: with so many big spiders around, how come we still get plagued by flies? They are not doing their job properly. Its like how we have two cats but still had mice come in and chew through the flex on our old washing machine.