Creepie crawlies

More USA photos in the production line... but this one was taken closer to home, in my own backyard in fact.

We seem to have been overrun this autumn by a veritable plague of creepie crawlies, no doubt due to the warm summer we just had. I have a house full of tiny little black flies, pesky things that are so small I have to put my glasses on to make sure they're not just a speck of something inanimate. Then when I try to squish them they leap up and fly away before I can blink - and, being so small, you can't see where they've gone. So the pantomime repeats over and over.  I guess I need spiders and, believe me, in my 100+ year old house I have 100+ year old spiders - huge, spooky things. The indoor ones, however, are nothing like as beastly as this monster in the garden. A common Garden Spider, it has been there for days, carefully mending and re-mending its orb web. Unfortunately it has made the mistake of being hooked up in large part to the dustbin so when the time comes for it to be emptied (Thursday) he is going to get a rude awakening.