This is the joyous season for arachnophiles, when fat, eight-legged creatures take up residence in our houses to cast their nets in the trawl for houseflies. Countless billions of other, far tinier spiders laboriously weave a gossamer carpet across our fields that you can see only when they are covered in dew or lit by slanting sunlight. The spider is one of our most munificent beasts. Why bother with insect spray when you have a cheerful, ecologically sound animal to catch your houseflies for you? No spider ever comes to any harm in my house; no spider is shooed away from her rigging, nor dislodged from the cornice where she turns pests into tasty fast food: McBluebottles.
House-flies
Oddly enough, James O'Connor and Patrick Ashe, the authors of Irish Indoor Insects, just published by Town House of Dublin (with splendid line-drawings by Sean Milne), do not propose importing spiders into your home to control house-flies. I cannot imagine why. Spiders, it is true, can be uncommunicative, often surly companions. They tend to brood a great deal, and can exhibit unseemly haste when it comes to dinner-time. Yet their bad table manners and their often sullen aloofness are more than offset by their benign effect on the home. They can reduce a burly bluebottle that you would wreck a kitchen trying to swat into an empty husk in that peculiar measurement of time, a trice: and as for mosquitoes, dear me, what is a malarial pest to you and me is popcorn to a decent house-spider. And not just mosquitoes. Think, now, of the cheese-skipper, whose maggots bore into the best cheddar or Cashel Blue, and which can skip 25 centimetres in a single bound. They don't just eat cheese; they eat faeces too, leaping from one to the other with much merry aplomb. The best housekeeping guides agree: there are better ways to round off a dinner party than having the cheeseboard bound towards your guests, apparently of its own accord and reeking of dogpoo.
The cheese-skipper's abominable habits don't end there. "The maggots," the authors warn sepulchrally, "if consumed, can cause serious internal problems by burrowing into the intestinal walls and are voided alive in the faeces." Dear me. Oh dearie, dearie me. Do you know, I think your guests might have something to say about your hospitality if that was the outcome, so to speak.
And Lord above, there are such beasts that would fairly overwhelm us if we hadn't spiders to keep them at bay. The sewage fly has habits every bit as bad as the name implies, and they are such skilled criminals that they can enter a house through tiny cracks in the wall, emerging in your home and heading for the loo with a greedy look on their faces and napkins tucked under their chins.
Mixed company
Even a harmless-sounding reptile like the moth-fly - of which there are 60 species in Ireland - has habits too deplorable to discuss in mixed company. They breed in excrement, and their larvae hang about in the bacterial scum of sewers. Which merely confirms the worst prognostications about modern youth. And it is not a question of adolescent males causing the problems of society: the black fungus gnats appear to have created a sort of insectile lesbian paradise. There are no males, at all. After the girls have a good time with one another in large groups - I do hope the children are in bed; please destroy this after reading it - they go off and lay their eggs in - oh here we go again - yet more excrement.
Enough! Let us move on to beetles, which I love almost as much as I love spiders. The Holly weevel was first discovered in Powerscourt, Co Wicklow. It is perfectly harmless, if a little shy, but speaks half-a-dozen languages, and likes nothing more than to curl up with a good book. The house cricket is similar, preferring non-fiction to fiction. Apparently, the cricket was introduced to Ireland by returning crusaders in the 13th century, and of course they were once common sitting by the fire, warbling their little heads off, probably in Arabic. "If you are lucky enough to have them in your house," the authors urge, "do treasure them. "
No sightings
Needless advice, surely: who could but not love this sturdy little Moor yodelling of distant Araby and the soukhs and the bazaars of old Baghdad? Alas, the cricket is all too rare, and no sightings of it were made in Ireland between 1960 and 1991, when a female was discovered in Castleknock. She has raised a family there, and that suburb now has the most active branch of the PLO outside the Middle East. Sometimes, the Arab cricket contingent in Ireland is added to by the Egyptian Grasshopper, an occasional visitor which, say the authors (who, I must say, I like tremendously), "can be kept as a pet and fed on lettuce and similar foods."
Finally, among my favourite beasts of all: earwigs. They are the most lovely creatures, though shamefully traduced in folklore. Unlike most insect species, which scandalously neglect motherly duties, earwig mammies mind their young, defending and feeding their brood well into earwig adolescence, when girl earwigs start giggling and shaving their legs, and boy earwigs' voices break and they begin to ogle photographs of naked female earwigs with big thoraxes.
So. My advice for today. No house is complete without (a) a complement of spiders and (b) a copy of Irish Indoor Insects: a perfect delight.