Most of the things I write about have some sort of creativity as their engine: memories of how things were, or ideas about how they might be, with words wrapped around them for effect.
I don't, then, generally bother with things which I am directly experiencing at the time of writing - the Spanish estoy pensando, present continuous.
It is different at the moment, though. There is a spider, large by English standards, roaming the downstairs part of the house, and it is this which occupies my thoughts, my typing.
I first saw him (they're always male, in colloquial spoken English) on Thursday night, half-emerged from a small hole at the bottom of the door frame. There have been a few of them guarding that little entrance since I moved here in April, recoiling back into their abode when the pressure of my foot stirs the ground next to them.
Not this dinner-plate, though. I can walk past with deliberately heavy footsteps, and the spider remains rudely stationary. This is an inversion of the natural order of things, and I feel affronted. David is giving Goliath, in relative terms, the middle finger.
Some 30 minutes ago, I detected movement from the corner of my left eye. Inevitably, my intruder had broken cover and taken residence under one of the wooden bars connecting two of the table legs in the living room. I orbited it, fitfully, for what seemed like an eternity, trying to ascertain the best angle to launch a rescue mission with a giant soup mug - the largest drinking vessel I own.
I tentatively dabbed - this is the best word, for it implies no conviction - the mug within the vicinity of the spider on two occasions, both time withdrawing my hand as though next to a hotplate. I stood back to admire its circumference, even pausing to take a photograph with my mobile phone (from a distance of a few feet, coward that I am.)
Then, gone, and I don't know where. I shifted my gaze for a matter of seconds, and my opponent had made its next move. I now scan the room anxiously - the walls, the floor, around the corners of objects.
I shan't kill it, even if spiders do possess all the characteristics to spark a cognitive emergency. Their very shape - that of a cracked windscreen - spells danger; their movement a confusing blur. This goes for the limp English ones as much as those which carry a genuine threat.
Yet I implore myself not to harm them. Should we not show our house guests hospitality, even if conversation is difficult and we'd much rather they go back to their own place? I shan't kill it, even though visions of it have disturbed my sleep for the last few nights; nightmares of swallowing it whole.
No horror writer could devise a more sinister enemy than the monster which generates spiders willy-nilly, impaled in victims like death stars. The corner of my kitchen seems to generate them regularly.
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