All lace and legs

How much are we slaves to our hormones and gender conditioning?

For blokes, and I can only speak for blokes, I don't think the wiring diagram is too complicated, nor does the internal circuitry contain much in the way of resistors. Plenty of amplifiers, though.

So when the silky siren call came, I responded. What else could I do? It's pre-programmed via thousands of years of evolution. Or sin, depending upon your viewpoint.

You will have to judge for yourselves whether this is the sweet-sounding, seductive siren of Greek mythology...

The Siren, oil on canvas by Edward Armitage, Leeds Art Gallery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Armitage_Siren.JPG#file)

or the less easy on the ear, nerve-jangling, piercing klaxon of alarm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Picswiss_BL-56-08.jpg

But returning to the siren song...

A female voice called from the bedroom, full of emotion and yearning.

"There's a spider in here... on your side."

Now it's probably fair to say that, wherever a spider appeared, in a bedroom or anywhere else, it would be on 'my' side*. If this seems to you like a rather arbitrary** rule, I would say you're correct, but perhaps we're both missing the point.

Returning to the arachnid in question, it was indeed on my side, halfway up the wall in the corner of the room. It wasn't a species that I had knowingly seen before, so I took the opportunity to photograph it for posterity. Apologies for the poor quality of the shot, I don't think the designers of image stabilisation technology had this particular scenario in mind. As luck would have it, Very Wrong Len was fitted to the camera, so I had to be a minimum of 1.5m from my subject to bring it into focal range. I realised later, that some indication of scale would have been useful, but I don't think my dulcet-toned partner would have been happy holding a ruler within 30cm of anything that looked like this...

A lace webbed spider, Amaurobius similis, I believe

The internet reckons that one of its prey species is the humble wood louse. Yep, we've got those too, so Well Done, Mr Internet.

Photo shoot over, the spider was bustled outside to take its chances with the local Wren.

* The same is not true for bed space. None of that is my side.

** I can do arbitrary too, though. For instance, I don't think Our Lass should remove a 'weed' from the garden unless she can identify it. Or, folk out hunting duck should know exactly which species of duck it is, before they blow it out of the sky.