The Delights And Perils Of Skinny-Dipping

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It is many years since I went skinny-dipping with a chum. It was at the end of a very hot midsummer day when we may have had a drink or four of his lethal home-made beer.

We walked out to the Ray, a sandbank near Southend, stripped off and dived in. The water sobered us up fairly quickly and we swam out to a small boat bobbing nearby, climbed in and rested for a while. Our rest was short-lived for we realised that the sandbank was becoming somehow narrower and that the tide was coming in. Boy!, did we jump back in the water and head for shore fairly quickly!

It was a wonderful evening for, as the sun disappeared and the lights of Southend lit the mud we now had to stumble across, something very magical happened.

Every footprint became brightly lit by a blue-white luminescence. We stopped at one point and looked back to where the tide was approaching in the distance. There behind us was a trail of footprints lit by enchanting but slowly fading lights in the mud.

We came to no harm that memorable evening, despite foolishly misjudging the tide, except getting our legs covered in mud up to our knees.

Which cannot be said for a Canadian tourist in New Zealand who decided to skinny-dip in the sea and then have a snooze on the beach afterwards in his unclad state.

This poor man woke to find his member had become swollen and painful with a red mark on it which suggested that it had been bitten. By the time he reached the nearest hospital, in the northern town of Dargaville, his member was severely swollen, his blood pressure was up and his heartbeat racing.

Doctors decided that he had been bitten by a katipo, a Maori name meaning ‘night-stinger’, a rare native spider related to the Australian redback and North American black widow spiders. The man then spent the next sixteen days in hospital suffering from a potentially fatal heart inflammation. After treatment with anti-venom medicine, he was able to return safely home to Canada.

By comparison, my skinny-dipping adventure all those years ago was thankfully memorable in a entirely different way!
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Archie

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I used to give a lift to the City a former army officer who, after he retired from the military, took a job in the civil service.

During the hour-long run up to town, he would regale me with his various tales of life in the military and one day the subject of spiders came up, though I no longer recall why. It seems that he saw service in Uganda and was posted from there to Germany and, when he moved, his furniture went with him.

One evening he had some friends round for supper and they were relaxing afterwards with a drink when a terrified women guest jumped out of her chair and shouted that she had just seen a large hairy spider shoot across the room and dart back underneath the sofa on which her husband was sitting. It seemed that the arachnid in question was a wolf spider and it became seen so often around the living room that my chum and his wife came to regard it almost as a family pet. Indeed, they called it Archie.

From time to time, Archie with his eight eyes would shoot off into a corner of the room, grab another spider or a fly, and run back into his home underneath the sofa. And, much later when the couple moved back to England, Archie came with them and was seen now and again keeping the place free of other insects.

Some time after this conversation my wife and I were invited round for supper, but it was an invitation I declined on some pretext or another. The simple reason was that I just don’t like spiders since an unexpected encounter with a large hairy one as a child.

My chum, and his ‘pet’ wolf spider Archie, came to mind this morning when I read that a colony of cave spiders which had been ‘squatting’ in a disused building in the Yorkshire Dales had been returned to the nearby cave from which they had escaped ten years ago.

It seems that a team of archaeologists surveying their cave habitat near Chapel Fell managed to bring some of the insects back in their equipment. And from there the creatures made their home in this disused building.

They were lucky. Had I seen them, they were likely to have been squished!
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