Let me answer that question straight away.  I don’t know.  Perhaps it is a subjective fear, in the same way that some people are scared of spiders, and some are not.  Perhaps some spiders are afraid of conkers, and others are not.  Some spiders might find a conker’s shiny, round, solidity a source of terror, in the same way that some people will be petrified by a spider’s stealthy, willowy, scuttling.  Whilst other spiders might just look at a conker and think: take it or leave it.

However, it remains a persistent old wives’ tale, which has been handed down from generation to generation, that if you place conkers by the front door of your house no spiders will enter.  Quite why a spider should be so polite as to come through the front door, I don’t know, but there it is.

Every September, my house is a magnet for spiders––big blighters, that treat my gaff as though they own it.  Routinely, I will catch them, march them off down the street, and release them at a sufficiently remote distance that they can surely have no hope of returning but, without fail, the next evening, there will be another one strolling across the centre of my lounge carpet, treating my property as though it were a web-from-home.

So, bored with this regular autumn invasion, I decided to give the conker remedy a go.  After all, what did I have to lose?  Putting thoughts into immediate action, I quickly collected a handful of conkers from my local park; laid them out in a neat line across the carpet alongside my front door.  At first, they looked slightly incongruous, but I quickly grew used to them, and soon they became just another element of the mismatching décor of my house.  And, around the same time that I forgot about the conkers, I also forgot about the spiders.  Three autumns have now passed since I first placed conkers by my door and, in all that time, I haven’t spotted a single spider in my house.

Coincidence?  Quite possibly.  Some truth in the old wives’ tale?  I wouldn’t like to comment. 

However, there has been one slight, unexpected consequence of this new status quo.  I find myself suffering from spider-guilt.  Somehow, I feel that I am being rather inhospitable to my local spiders, rather akin to hanging a notice on my front door stating: No hawkers, no circulars, no spiders.

It is a similar situation as to when I don’t leave a pumpkin outside my house at Halloween and, by so doing, indicating that Trick-or-Treaters are not welcome.  Except that I feel absolutely no sense of guilt about that.

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree wonders if it is too early in the year for his traditional Trick-or-Treat joke?

Never too early:  So, Trick-or-Treat?  Scotland invented it; the US made it bigger; and then they dumped it back on us sometime towards the end of the last century.  A bit like Rod Stewart.