Bat Dog/Cat Fish/What Scares You?

A couple of the Little People decided to play dressing up. One dressed up as a bat, the other as a pirate. Later, they abandoned hats and scarves and went off to make a car with the dining chairs and set off on an adventure.

Indy was on the sofa. The bat hat was next to him. I couldn’t resist. I was going to take it off, but after I took the photo he went off to sleep still wearing the bat hat.

Meanwhile, the kitten has taken up fish watching!

He is amazing. So tiny and yet so unafraid of the dogs and they must look enormous to him.

Today out with Indy there was a tractor on the field cutting the grass. Scared? Too right I was. I’m almost as scared of tractors as I am of spiders. I have been known to get hysterical when they’ve turned up and started working on a field I’m on.

I’ve leapt across ditches and into bushes. It’s completely irrational I know. Today the tractor was already there, so I carefully walked where he’d already cut the grass, but I walked close to the hedge and planned to pick Indy up and leap into it if it came anywhere near us.

Meanwhile my daughter finds a snake wandering round her allotment and moves it. Her husband thinks it incredible that she can be so petrified of a spider that she’s stuck in her bedroom for half an hour too scared to move, yet she’ll happily touch a snake.

That’s the thing with things that scare us. It isn’t always rational. We’re all scared of the same sort of things to some degree or other, but my fear of tractors has always seemed ridiculous. Then we remembered the public service adverts that used to be on when we were kids.

I’ve looked for them online, but can’t find them, but they were scary. Maybe it harks back to then.

My dad, who gently picked up the biggest spiders to put outside; who was on the Arctic Convoys; who was generally fearless, was terrified of wasps. Understandable that. Mosquito larvae too – I remember showing him a jam jar full of little fish I’d found in the water butt! He hit the roof, but he’d almost died of Malaria, so again, understandable.

But he was scared of crabs, so when I used to catch them and take them home to show him (just little ones) he’d tell me to take them back to the beach as quickly as possible. It was only years later that my mum told me he used to break out in a sweat and his skin would crawl at the sight of them.

So what makes your skin crawl?