Wiltshire Council and the spider in the bath

THAT’S it, I said to my absent husband on the phone.  Proof that it’s autumn. There’s a giant spider in the bath.

When we first bought our house the previous occupants had thoughtfully covered it with a kind of Russian vine.

To call it an invasive plant would be an understatement.  A rampaging monster, it was constantly having to be cut back from all the front windows to avoid a blackout.

As soon as we chopped it back it seemed to put on a growth spurt. And it brought with it a wealth of insect life. It was the spider that brought it to mind. At this time of year in particular we used to be haunted by them.

They would scurry out from underneath one armchair and dive under the next, to hide. My husband, keenly interested in wildlife even at the most inopportune moments, said he thought they were wolf spiders. Then, upon reflection, he decided they were giant house spiders. I said I didn’t care what they were, with legs that huge they’d have to be caught and put outside.  It was them or me, and I couldn’t sit with my feet up off the floor all night.

“They’ll only come straight back in again,” he would say, reasonably. But I was beyond being reasoned with.

Grasshoppers used to climb up where the vine snaked through the sash windows in the boys’ bedrooms and perch on the ceilings, bemused at suddenly finding themselves in a blank, white, alien environment with no idea how to get out again, so they had to be removed, too.

What with the added peril of the annual wasps’ nests in the attic – I came to dread that dozy time of year when I’d find them crawling across my young sons’ bedclothes – it was all a bit much.

The day my husband finally decided to tackle the vine some 20 years ago was one I will never forget. I know it’s a cliché, but it really was like Jack and the Beanstalk. Its fallen remains filled the front garden twice over.

Now we still get enormous spiders, but mostly they only pop up through the plughole, and since they can’t climb the sides of the bath, if I’m on my own and I’m not feeling up to trying to catch them in a jug, I can always just have a shower instead.

Speaking of fairy tales, as I was in passing, there will certainly be a happy ending to 2013 for the top brass at Wiltshire Council who are to enjoy pay rises of up to £19,000. That’s more than many people in Salisbury earn in a year, as a quick glance at Journal Jobs will show.

Apparently the council fears it won’t be able to attract and keep executives of the right calibre because its current rates are “adrift of the market”.

I’d have thought there’d be plenty of competent candidates prepared to settle for six-figure sums and comfy public sector pensions in the current economic climate. But maybe it’s a different world up there.

Or maybe Wiltshire’s problems have as much to do with morale as with money.  Certainly among the lower orders, who can only look on enviously at their bosses while they are stuck with a below-inflation ‘rise’ of just 1 per cent.

Does leader Jane Scott know that they have their own version of the ‘Where everybody matters’ motto?

It’s ‘Where everybody mutters’.