Run Alive

If you want to draw moral life lessons from sport - and what else is it for? - you could weave a story that Kerr and Ingebrigtsen were so proud and boastful in their competition with one another that they ignored the wider context and allowed someone less hubristic to triumph (if sport is a closed book to you, this is the story of the Olympic men's 1500 metres final, just completed, which the athletics world has been billing as a gladiatorial showdown between the two men)

Arachnids are named after Arachne, a proud artistic weaver, who declared her work better than the goddess Athena, the originator of the craft. This is Greek mythology, so inevitably we are heading for nemesis. Athena gave Arachne a chance to show humility, Arachne demurred, they entered into competition. Here it gets interesting: Arachne's work was indeed better than the goddess. Furthermore, it depicted the many shortcomings and moral failures of the gods

The powerful goddess beat and humiliated Arachne, destroying her work, and drove her to suicide. Then she had an attack of conscience and resurrected her as a spider, with the gift of weaving in perpetuity. On the one hand, a neat closure to the tale; on the other, a meditation on the fate of the dissenting artist in the face of tyranny

I had to research this arachnid and discovered it is a 'funnel-weaver'. In truth, it creates scruffy, formless, dirty webs in dark corners, that gather dust. We spent the morning removing them from the apiary shed (again), as my lungs now attest. This is a deep-clean in furthur pursuit of the foulbrood bacterium

The arachnid is a Giant House Spider (a name applied to several species of Eratigena), and it is indeed big enough to arouse my residual arachnophobia, so a jam-jar and carboard came into play (which explains the unfortunate glare in the picture). You could imagine the patterns on that abdomen would make an attractive woven cloth. I made a little joke with myself about it being a Giant Shed Spider, then read on and discovered that one related species does in fact prefer sheds to houses, and is known as the 'Aggressive House Spider', with a reputation for biting humans! You can't be too careful, as Arachne discovered