For as long as I can remember, I’ve been terrified of spiders. Growing up, the tranquillity of Rose family life was regularly shattered by me screaming hysterically that an eight-legged enemy was in the bath/on the wall/under the bed, before retreating, trembling, to the far side of the room while my father dealt with it. Seeing so much as a photo of one ruined my day. I once spent half an hour on the phone to the Maldivian embassy interrogating them about local invertebrates before I agreed to let my boyfriend take me there on holiday. You get the picture.

This madness persisted until I found myself home alone one night, being charged at by the biggest spider I had ever seen. In tears, I had to beg a neighbour to deal with it. Something had to be done. Option A was years of expensive cognitive therapy; option B was London Zoo’s £110 Friendly Spider Programme. If A was the velvet glove, B was the iron fist: an afternoon of tea, sympathy, logic and therapy culminating in a visit to the spider house.

I listened to the experts. I drank the tea. But could I go into the spider house? Could I hell. My best friend Paul managed it, in spite of having snored happily through the hypnotherapy; I lay on the floor in the dark next to him and worried about a spider running over me. Along with the other 30 people on the programme, he emerged after half an hour with a certificate telling him what a brave boy he was. I was the only one who couldn’t do it. The shame.

The zoo-keepers, bless them, were wonderful: they really do want people to love spiders, so they didn’t give up on me. A few weeks later, my bloody-minded determination equalled theirs so I went back to try again. I spent an afternoon inching towards a house spider in a Perspex box on the other side of a room. Three hours and a lot of tears later, I was standing next to Frieda, a Mexican Red-Kneed spider whom Paul had unhelpfully described as more medium-sized dog than invertebrate. He was not lying: imagine how big a spider has to be in order to have knees. I am told that its fur – fur! – is velvety soft to the touch. I will never know. But I did stand near it, looked fairly closely at it and was photographed for posterity looking distinctly ill at ease next to it.

It was a startlingly unpleasant afternoon, but it seems to have worked. A mere £110 has made me significantly less hysterical about spiders and, at a push, able to deal with them myself (though that generally means killing them, not liberating them, as the zoo would prefer). And unbelievably, the top-up session was free: the zoo didn’t charge me because it said it was just seeing through the promise of the Friendly Spider Programme. So I sent them a cheque as a thank-you, with the request that they use it to help make Mexican Red-Kneed spiders extinct. They think I was joking.

bargainhunter@thetimes.co.uk

Carol Midgley is away

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