In praise of cyberchondria

There’s something perversely satisfying in discovering that your children have inherited your vices. That’s why I was so quietly pleased the other evening when Boy came to see me petrified that the huge fat spider with the sinister body-markings on the wall above his bed was in fact a deadly false widow with a bite — so the internet tells us — whose symptoms can range from ‘feelings of numbness, severe swelling and discomfort to various levels of burning or chest pains’.

Though I’m not personally scared of spiders, I could most certainly claim proud authorship of the catastrophist tendencies Boy was displaying here. Also — being a fellow cyberchondriac — I was more than happy to indulge his urge to go straight onto the web (ho! ho!) and find more details about the grisly arachnid now threatening his future.

First, we captured it in a jar. (I would have used my bare hands because I once read somewhere that no British spider has a bite capable of penetrating human skin and I’ve believed it ever since. But this time — for Boy’s sake — I made a point of sliding it onto a bit of paper, as you do with bees.) Then we Googled ‘false widow’ — to see whether the picture matched our specimen.

And, lo, it did. No question about it: the pattern on our spider was exactly the same as the one in the picture captioned ‘false widow’. While Boy began making preparations to move out of his bedroom, possibly for ever, I did the thing I occasionally do sometimes when I remember I’m supposed to be a professional journalist. I followed the link to be sure I hadn’t got the wrong end of the stick.

Just as well I checked.