Man’s world

In which a tiresome winter chore leads our ruminative Southern man to contemplate the the value of labour and persistence, and (of course) the meaning of it all.

Joe Bennett on the hard-earned fruits of one’s labour.

The silence of a winter afternoon and nothing’s doing. There’s nothing moving in my garden except me, and I’d rather not be. I’d rather be stretched in front of the fire but you can’t have a fire without wood and all the wood’s in the woodshed in the garden rather than the woodbin by the fire. It takes three wheelbarrow loads to fill the bin.

So I step into gumboots and the cold, and load the barrow, and wheel it across the sodden lawn and up the slope and biff the logs into the bin, and am coming back down to do it again when I spot the spider.

It is a medium-sized beast, halfway between crushable-with-a-wad-oftissue and run-screaming-from-theroom. It was presumably wintering in the woodpile and came on board with the logs and is now lying curled in a semi-foetal position in the tray of the wheelbarrow. It looks to be dead but as the barrow squelches across the lawn the spider rallies and organises its legs into a more recognisably spider arrangement and sets off up the north face of the barrow.

Spiders are famously good at walking up walls and across bedroom ceilings for the pleasure of terrifying a creature 74 billion times their mass, but this one struggles with the side of the moving barrow. It gets about halfway up, falls back down and is just starting up again with the persistence that is the hallmark of god’s littler creatures when we arrive back at the woodshed where it used to live.

Now, a kind heart would lift the spider from the barrow and place it tenderly in a safely distant corner of the woodshed to recover from its ordeal, but it is cold and I want to get the job done so I’m afraid the spider gets to take its chances. I lob fresh logs into the barrow. To the spider, it must seem as if the gods are biffing mountains. The logs clang against the metal tray, resounding in the misty air. With the barrow full I set off once more.

Wheelbarrows are ancient, having been invented by the Chinese around the time of Christ. But spiders are ancienter, having been around more or less unchanged for 400 million years. They must be doing something right. They saw the dinosaurs come and go.

As if to illustrate that durability, when I empty the second load of logs there he is still in the base of the tray. Traumatised, no doubt, but alive. And as we return across the lawn he once again unfurls himself and tries to scale the side of the barrow. You have to admire such persistence. Ripped from the comfort of a world he knows, hurled into terror and confusion, wheeled across an alien landscape in a vehicle he can’t see out of, bombarded, baffled and bewildered, and yet striving still at every opportunity to clamber out and start again, this has to more than a mere spider. This beast, surely, has to be a metaphor for something fundamental, something larger than itself.

And musing thus I load the barrow for the final time and wheel it back and empty it into the bin then peer into the base of the barrow for the indestructible life-force that is this spidercum-metaphor. Gone. Missing presumed dead. Ah well. You can’t get them all right. An hour later, fire blazing and toes toasting, I raise a glass of cheap scotch to nothing whatsoever. ✤