Yep, that’s right, one time I met Satan (or at least that’s what he told me his name was.) Where do you think it was? Prowling in the darkness of the wilderness? Maliciously wandering around the ruins of some ancient Pagan temple? Well, if either of those options did spring instantly into your mind, you’d have been wrong. Satan was actually strolling through the streets of Bath on one sunny afternoon when I was visiting there with my friends one day a few years ago.

Now, Bath is well known for its rather diverse range of street performers; you’ll find people playing music, human statues and even grown men wrestling in their underwear. Satan was one of these street performers, or rather, disguised as one of them as part of his diabolical plans. But before I describe how exactly he and I met, let me describe a little how he looked. Satan was surprisingly tall, he was much taller than me and I am already roughly six foot five, his skin was red and he had horns and a goatee, and he wore long robes and a cape.

I don’t mean to use my blog as a celebrity gossip page, but Satan sure was a rather audacious street performer. I spotted him walking around the streets, and at about the same time he seemed to spot me. He then proceeded to approach me, we looked each other in the face and he said, in a rather rasping voice, “I am Satan” and then he proceeded to hug me (by hug, I mean engulf me in his cape so that I was completely hidden from the sun. I don’t know why, but it was probably so that he could eat my soul or something).

Once he had finished, I thanked him for his performance, and gave him a pound for his troubles. Then, off he went, to continue his evil eternal wanderings across the surface of the Earth…

Yesterday I was happily sat on my bed using my laptop, doing the usual internet things, you know, like The Waltons Forum and just generally being laid back and relaxing with the computer. I had been for a few hours in fact. But somehow I had missed something…

Sat beside me, rather disturbingly, was a rather large house spider. Now, I don’t have any extreme irrational fear of spiders or anything, but I do find large house spiders to be rather unpleasant. Plus, house spiders do have particularly large fangs; I imagine a bite from them would be more than slightly painful. Anywho, what drew my attention to the spider was the fact that it had started walking towards me like some kind of creepy thing that moves towards things.

Upon seeing the spider make its advance towards me, I decided to go downstairs to get a jar to catch it in. I came back upstairs with a fresh spider-catching jar in my hand and prepared to capture it. However, when I returned to my room, the dastardly spider had gone. My door had been open the whole time I had gone to collect the jar, so I just assumed that the spider had run off into the hallway or back into the wall where I wouldn’t see it again. Unfortunately I was wrong, as the old saying goes assuming makes an, well, the gist is that assuming is bad.

So that night (hours later) when I went to bed, the spider made its reappearance. Everything seemed normal, I was lying in bed in the darkness, all was silent… But then I heard a scurrying about. The strange scurrying lasted for a couple of seconds before stopping. Could it have been the spider? Surely not, I must just be paranoid after having seen it up close earlier. That would seem like a logical conclusion for me to make, but then the scurrying started again and again, seemingly getting closer. I grabbed my 3DS from my bedside table (or from the swivel chair beside my bed, as it really is) and open it to use it as a light. There I could see the spider running around in some kind of frenzy.

It was a difficult task, but I managed to walk across the room without stepping on it or having it run up my trouser leg and then I switched on light and grabbed the jar I had brought up earlier. Obviously, this spider had been caught in a jar before because as soon as I grabbed it, the spider ran under my bed, running out and going back under again over and over. As I sat on my bed with my jar, it was like it was taunting me, its scurrying had made me turn the light on about an hour ago by now, and I was just watching it running around on the ground from my bed, wide awake. The hunter had become the hunted, but unfortunately, I had been the hunter originally. Luckily though, its stamina was not infinite and before long it decided to stop for a rest… On the side of my school bag.

My school bag was a rather difficult surface to catch a spider on, so I waited a few minutes for it to move… By a few minutes I mean around twenty. At the end of this time, I thought of something to do quickly. I went onto Facebook and decided to make a status out of my spider hunting, then I realised that it would be really sad to post about it (so I decided the blog was the place for it :D). But I made quite a mistake in looking away from the spider as when I looked back to my bag, it was gone (the spider, not the bag – thank goodness).

As it had been sitting next to the way into the bag, I decided it had probably hidden in there, so I quickly grabbed my bag and tossed it into the hallway, where I hoped it would return to the walls. But even then I wasn’t convinced, I waited for a while longer to see if I spotted it, and I think I started to go insane. I was convinced every slight noise or movement was it, and while one of or two of them may have been, I never saw it clearly again. In fact, it could be in my room with me now… Watching me write this entry… Waiting to make its next move…

Fun Fact: Today’s title is ‘The Hunt’ and it’s actually also the title of an episode of The Waltons – decided to use the same title 😀