This newspaper recently published a story about a local lady who brought home a nasty surprise with her groceries. For those of you who missed it, here’s a banana-flavoured taste…
A Mum was terrified after opening a bunch of supermarket bananas bought in Pontardawe and finding rare spiders – whose bite can give a man an erection lasting four hours.
Shocked Maria Layton, 43, found the bananas, shipped from Costa Rica, were infested with eggs from the Brazilian wandering spider – the most deadly in the world.
As soon as she discovered the cocoon they started to hatch so she quickly put them in a sealed container in the freezer and called Tesco customer services.
Now, out of several things that caught my attention in the article, there was one that I found particularly interesting. And it’s not the one you’re thinking! Go and give that filthy mind of yours a good wash!
But rest-assured, I will come to that bit in a moment.
No, what I initially thought was, “What a cool, calm and collected person Mrs. Layton must be”.
Because if I came home, put my shopping on the kitchen table, took out a bag of bananas and found a small army of baby spiders suddenly starting to hatch from a weird-looking cocoon and scuttling all over the place, I think I would have panicked.
I don’t suffer from arachnophobia with regard to British spiders, but when they turn up in bananas, they’re obviously from some tropical country where the bite of an insect or arachnid can cause serious problems.
But this plucky lady had the presence of mind not only to look for a container to put them in (How did she have the courage to pick them up?) but to seal it tight and put it in the freezer.
The species turned out to be ‘ wandering spiders’ and certainly lived up to their name, because the eight-legged little-un’s had wandered all the way from the steaming jungles of Brazil to a shelf in a supermarket’s fruit n’ veg. department in Pontardawe.
It’s the complete reverse of those endless ‘comedy-travel’ documentary series featuring a celebrity who pretends to ‘rough it’ in some remote wilderness on the other side of the world, but who actually spends each night in a first-class suite at the local Hilton or Marriott.
In this case the spiders’ heroic journey ended with them being sealed in a plastic box and locked in a freezer between a leg of lamb and a packet of fish fingers – a fate I often wish would happen to the celebrities who front ‘comedy-travel’ documentaries.
So now we come to the delicate bit.
If you pardon the expression…
The article said the bite of the wandering spider can cause a man to have a…embarrassed cough….erection…for four hours.
Two questions.
Who was the first person to find this out…and what was he doing with the spider at the time?
And…
After completing the act of love, what are men supposed to do for three hours fifty-five minutes?