I am tidying up a bit so that the garden still looks like a garden for its last phase of the summer. Some stuff I am leaving – like the fuschia – to give everyone a last meal. And shortly, I’m going to stop tidying up altogether, so that fallen leaves can rot back into the soil like last year, as this seems ugly but effective.

But the SPIDERS are stopping me doing this!

They are everywhere! Which I guess is a great marker of how many flying insects we have. But I feel mean if I chop down the stalks they have used as supports. And I feel even worse when I walk through their webs. There is a horrible sound (how can something so silent make such a noise?) and a clammy feeling as the web wraps round my face and then tears. There are some bits of the garden I don’t go into, and some I only go into waving my arms in front of me.

I am very curious about why spiders choose to build their webs where they do. There must be an optimal point – sunshine, breeze, passing traffic? But I wonder what the criteria are and whether they adapt where they spin or is it just chance? I can find lots about how spiders spin their webs but nothing about location. And depressingly, when you put the question into google, the first answer is a pest-exterminator web site, which happens quite a lot when you look up insects. I can’t believe anyone in the UK really needs to exterminate spiders.