Arachnoabcastavestitophobia

I've just had to invent it, because it's a disease I have acquired in the last twenty four hours.

Taken literally, and put together with an online Latin dictionary (Yes, I know. I am a geek) with no personal knowledge of Latin whatsoever, it means:

Fear of spiders in clean clothes.

Not to say that I have a fear of spotting a spider in a fresh suit, but I have acquired rather a lot of spiders recently and I only yesterday discovered where they were coming from.

How, in my double-glazed, modern, chimney-less room, with no spiders' webs or nests that I could find, was I gaining about twenty or thirty baby spiders a day?

After a while it dawned on me that they were a problem (...i.e. a fresh intake...) only every so often...about every two to three days. When I realised this, I noticed that it coincided not with the washing of clothes, but of the ironing of them. The spiders, the cheeky buggers, were getting me to smuggle them into my own room. Upon inspection of the washing line in the fading daylight last night, I discovered what appeared to be the remains of four, yes FOUR spider's nests. And the washing line was literally crawling with them. If I had been in a film at that moment, there would have been a sharp sting of music as the realisation leapt across my face and I walked back into the house with a sense of foreboding.

When I got back inside, my ironing pile of fresh, clean, and garden-air-dried shirts was distributing the little bastards over the back of my couch, and I spotted a couple making a break for it across the carpet. Needless to say I waxed wroth, and left none that I could find alive. It was lucky that I realised yesterday, because nestling in the armpit of my favourite shirt was Big Mummy Spider, obviously impressed with her offspring's nifty little scheme and planning to move the whole breeding operation indoors out of the rain. Out of deference to her senior position I hefted her over the garden fence into next door's vegetable patch, because I'm a live-and-let-live kinda guy really; I felt guilty for wiping out a five-shirt-strong inbound wave of her offspring, and because the family next door would be safe from her kids' cunning tactics through having a tumbledryer.

Film music: End of action sequence. High-pitched, whiny suspense music begins.

By this time, and in accordance with the well-documented principles of psychology, I was beginning to feel a litte itchy. You know. That...disconcerting feeling when your skin tells you that something is on you when your eyes can see there's nothing there...I had a terrible night's sleep and dreamt of a Harry-Potter-esque sized spider, massive and hairy, on a beach. I have no idea why it was on a beach. Perhaps that area of psychology is less well understood.

Anyway, the MAJOR problem occured after the night of spider dreams when this morning I realised that despite the (now hopefully absent) spider infestation I was still going to have to wear one of my shirts to work...