Spider v Woodlouse

The downstairs cloakroom is my toilet of choice. We have four to choose from and I doubt that I shall ever tolerate fewer. I dislike competition and value exclusivity. Besides, that small room is by far the best as a reading room and I am currently engaged with Lee Child's '61 Hours', the latest Jack Reacher novel. I should be careful of reviewing books before I have completed them - I nearly got my fingers burned with 'The Lost Symbol' - but this might be the best yet. I always smile a bit at the epithet 'unputdownable' as I can not afford not to put a book down however good it is but I return to this as often as possible.

You would think then that I might not easily be distracted from this morning's pages but I was. The cloakroom, or toilet if you will, has pale coloured tile; thus anything moving across it catches the eye. The first was the larger of the two, a woodlouse. Not large for a woodlouse but much, much larger than the spider which was the second thing and perhaps 8-10 times smaller than its apparent rival for insect/arachnid lebensraum.

There ensued a combat-ballet in which the spider David appeared to challenge the Goliath crustacean. Apparently woodlice do not eat spiders or this bravado might swiftly have been concluded. Thick though the South Dakota snow (in 61 Hours) was and even as the plot thickened, I was more captivated by the battle below which the spider apparently won as the larger creature went off in a huff.

We had woken to (although not been woken by) the storm outside which subesquently dominated the day. The combination of rain and wind was wearing and demotivating especially in the context of my last day of leave. We stayed in, ate a pea risotto and I turned back to my albums of the 1980s to further enhnce my Flickr photostream. We watched our rather overdue recordings of BBCs recent 'Sherlock' and hope fevently that the three episodes will have proved a successful  pilot.