Neither our daughter Ruth nor her flat-mate, Katie, is fond of spiders.

The previous statement may qualify as a contender for biggest understatement of the decade. The truth is Ruth is pathologically frightened of them and Katie is twice as scared.

We have to check garden chairs for signs of web-building before she will sit down. Famously, she rang us on her mobile phone from our doorstep because there was a spider quite near the door which rendered her incapable of crossing the threshhold.

So when Katie spotted something that might be a spider in the kitchen of their third floor home she acted with enormous presence of mind. She dropped a glass bowl over the beastie and only then jumped on the sofa and screamed.

Ruth arrived home later and was informed of the terror in the kitchen. As Katie had taken her life in her hands and captured the thing, it was Ruth’s job to dispose of it.

A week later – or was it a month – she regarded the Thing under the Bowl and decided this was The Moment.

Summoning all her courage she approached the bowl, slid a piece of card under it (as recommended in the Arachnophobes’ Guide to Spider procedure) and lifted it up. Bravely, she stared her foe in the eye and identified it as... a raisin.