After brutally vacuuming up a total of 16 spiders from my bedroom walls this evening I realised the end of procrastination was nigh. It became apparent that I had done pretty much everything possible to avoid making a difficult decision and now had nothing left to do but sit and think about it. “However, I COULD write a blog post about vacuuming those spiders which gives me another solid half an hour or so of not making a decision”. And that’s my piss-poor explanation/apology for whatever spiel you’re about to read.

I generally like spiders; they keep the bothersome fly population under control and apparently some have brains so big that their other organs have to overflow in to their legs. I was going to let the 5 in my peripheral vision set up shop for a while until they inevitably made tracks. Maybe one was a boy spider and one was a girl spider and they liked each other and wanted to riddle my room with baby spiders. Now they have died a death in my vacuum bag as tragic as Jack Dawson in the icy waters surrounding the Titanic.

I’m not a fidgety person unless something is bothering me. I was sat at my laptop glancing over at these spiders wondering how they had the nerve to just dangle there distracting me. Didn’t they have better things to do like make a slightly more remarkable web than the one pitifully hanging by a mere thread? And what food store had they compiled between them? ONE MOTH. It was just embarrassing. There are insects adventuring around my bedroom all the time with it being an underground cellar conversion.

I then did that thing I do where I feel sorry for inanimate objects and insects with no real understanding of life and death. They aren’t so bad, these spiders. They don’t deserve to die. My counter-argument was that their silk is supposedly as strong as steel and that they could easily take over the world with that and their vast numbers if only they had the damn motivation. So why SHOULD I feel sorry for them?

I realise in retrospect that they hadn’t done anything wrong, these peaceful arachnids. I was taking my troubles of not being able to make this important decision out on my eight-legged friends and dragged the hoover in to my room with a cackle as disturbing as Norman Bates.

Once I got started there was no stopping me – destroying a family of five wasn’t enough. I scoured the corners of my room for any more spiders that were hiding from me and by the end had an impressive collection of 128 legs in my hoover. Did I feel good about myself? No. I remember a teacher telling me never to vacuum up spiders because they can survive and crawl back out the hoover again.. which is a fairly disturbing thought due to my paranoia about insects having an instinct for revenge.

I have basically wasted 30 minutes to conclude that I am indecisive AND a murderer.