A pain in the neck...

And I entered the door when I returned from the morning dog walk, I felt a large thing hit the back of my neck. For a moment I thought one of my hearing aids had dislodged and fallen down the back of my neck. I felt my ear to check and realised the hearing aid was still in place but I was still aware of the thing on the back of my neck. I brushed it with my hand to dislodge it and discovered it was this rather large spider with a massive abdomen. As it's markings were quite distinctive I decided to photograph to see if I could identify it. 

I had several false starts in trying to capture it but eventually managed to capture it on our kitchen work surface which incidentally had a similar colour range. It tried several times to climb onto the perspex cutting board but fell over onto its very large back  waving its legs about and in the end I had to rescue it and turn it over. Eventually it did make it to the top of the cutting board and it is here that I have  photographed it.

I think it is a female crab spider of the thomasidae family. These spiders do not spin webs but can produce silk for drop lines as I witnessed whenever I tried to dislodge her from locations. I suspect it was on a drop line from the door frame that I first encountered her on my neck. 

As there something like 2500 species which are members of this family I have not been able to narrow down the identification. Evidently the female are massively larger than the males so I assume this must be a female. The female are as much as 60 times bigger than the males so I dread to think what they would be like if this was indeed a male.