What a web we weave
Written by John Macpherson
The web © John MacPherson
“Yo pider! Thats a fine web.”
I told the orb-web-spider as I clambered up onto the kitchen sink at 11pm one night. My one leg in the sink, the other stretched across the large second storey window, and jammed against a wall.
A day of frantic pider effort had resulted in a fine confection of delicate beauty. But deadly.
“Pider! pider! pider!” exclaimed my two year old son William eagerly as he’d watched it hunt, pouncing from the window corner, as he himself spidered up on a piece of lunchtime cheese.
We watched the show together every lunchtime for a week.
And here we were, eyes to eye, pider peering through his eight, me peering through only one. A close-up lens.
Behind the pider the street light, thrown out-of-focus by the lens, created MY orb, ensnaring my prey in a pool of diffusion.
“Yo pider, do you see me! Do you see me?” I asked from two inches away.
And if pider did, did pider wonder at my one giant eye. And wonder what it was seeing?
Perhaps.
Perhaps not.
But as I discovered later, several of my neighbours did.
Author — John Macpherson
John MacPherson was born and lives in the Scottish Highlands. He trained as a welder in the Glasgow shipyards, before completing an apprenticeship as a carpenter, and then qualified as a Social Worker in Disability Services. Along the way he has cooked on canal barges, trained as an Alpine Ski Leader & worked as an Instructor for Skiers with disabilities, been a canoe instructor, and tutor of night classes in carpentry, stained glass design and manufacture, and archery. He has travelled extensively on various continents, undertaking solo trips by bicycle, or motorcycle. He has had narrow escapes from an ambush by terrorists, been hit by lightning, caught in an erupting volcano, trapped in a mobile home by a tornado, kidnapped by a dog's hairdresser, rammed by a basking shark and was once bitten by a wild otter. He has combined all this with professional photography, which he has practised for over 35 years. He teaches photography and acts as a photography guide & tutor in the UK and abroad. His biggest challenge is keeping his 30 year old Land Rover 110 on the road. He loves telling and hearing stories.