Banner for In Touch With Nature 2025Picture caption: close up of a Golden Orb Spider. You can clearly see the orb in the centre and the golden thread
Spiders get a lot of negative press everywhere. Recently, there have been a number of poems about spiders on WordPress and all of them paint spiders as scary creatures which do much harm to humans. I decided to write this post as a tribute to spiders which actually do a lot of good in this world. There are some venomous spiders, but these are in the minority. Thousands of spiders die at the hand of humans due to ignorance and unfounded fear.
The spider I am focusing on for this post is the South African Golden Orb Spider. From March to May, the Golden Orb Spider is an outstanding feature of the NorthWest province in South Africa. Hundreds of these large spiders can be seen everywhere, spinning and guarding their webs, and doing what spiders do which is catching and consuming prey, usually insects, and reproducing.
The female of this species is 1,000 times bigger than the male. The female spins the web and allows several males to cohabitat on the web. The males are usually found at the top of the web while the female sits at the hub, facing downwards, and waiting for insects to become trapped in the web. She then wraps the insect in web to immobilise it, kills it with one bite, and moves it to the centre of the web for immediate consumption or to store in her ‘larder’. I know you are thinking this is cruel but think about the contents of your own freezer. I often think that if the Martians from War of the Worlds arrived on Earth now, they would have had no conscience about eating people after peeping into the average freezer which is stuffed full of meat.
While in Bruxelles, we went on a chocolate tour and this is where I learned about a few of the chocolatiers and distributors of Belgian chocolate. These are a few of my photographs.
Picture caption: Les Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert Galerie (this is the covered mall in Bruxelles)
The chocolate tour started at the Les Galeries Royales, a covered mall in Bruxelles. It is a very upmarket mall that was originally for the royals and their friends only.
Picture caption: Another photograph of the undercover mall. It is very beautiful. You can see the many doors along the corridorPicture caption: Front window of Leonidas, the first chocolate shop we visitedPicture caption: Front window of Neuhaus which calls itself the inventors (of pralines)Picture caption: This is a doors challenge, so here is the door into NeuhausPicture caption: A chocolate bust of Jean Neuhaus Jnr and an example of Neuhaus chocolatesPicture caption: Window of Mary’s, a chocolatier started by a woman which makes it unusual as it was at a time when women did not own businessesPicture caption: TC going through the door of BS40. This chocolatier is different as it is owned by a Japanese couple and has a distinctly Japanese flavour to its productsPicture caption: This is the door to the Atelier Sainte Catherine. This is the only one of the chocolatiers we visited that makes its chocolate on the premises in a factory at the back. I liked that aspect.
By the time I was eleven years old, I had accumulated a large personal collection of books, ranging from children’s picture books to adult novels. Some of these books were birthday and Christmas gifts accumulated over my short life, others had been purchased at school and church fund raising fetes. I had quickly learned that book stalls at fetes were a fantastic place for me to acquire any book I wanted, regardless of suitability for a young girl. Volunteers barely glanced at my piles of books as they mechanically removed the price tags and totted up the total due. I always had a few bags on hand to stuff them into as quickly as possible. I managed to acquire a few gems like Lace, Princess Daisy, and various Dean R Koontz and Stephen King novels. I remember one book about a ship lost in the Bermuda Triangle that gave me nightmares for weeks.
Friends and my three younger sisters, regularly asked to borrow my books. This seemed like a reasonable request, but I needed to keep track of who borrowed which book. Inspiration hit and I decided to create my own library. I spent several weeks making card sleeves and cards for every book I owned. At that time, it was a few hundred as opposed to the few (three) thousand I now own in a physical form.
The day came when my library was ready, and I invited friends over to borrow books. They filled their names and the date on the beautiful blank cards and took my books away. Sadly, many came back damaged by bending or water stains and some never came back at all. This poor treatment of my most treasured possessions sadly shook my faith in humanity and I closed my library. I have never again loaned out a book that I wanted to keep. If I lend anyone a book it is technically a gift as I don’t want the post reading damaged goods returned to me. This was a life lesson I have never forgotten.
Water stained
Broken and battered
Veterans
Of neglect
And blatant indifference
Life lesson soon learned
Picture caption: This is my original copy of Tom SawyerPicture caption: This book, Tom Sawyer, still has the sleeve and card I made for my library inside it
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