OK, I confess. I have a crap cat. A pathetic pussy. A failed feline. Spookie is a veritable mountain of cat, one of those huge, amorphous grey blobs which menace the feline population and charm their way into the hearts of cat receptive humans such as me. He fulfils many of the essential cat tasks in the house, he sheds on the sofa, scratches enthusiastically at chair legs, throws up when he eats too fast and has a purr which can cause seismic disturbances. And as I work from home, he is used to attention-and food on demand. He fails, however in one important cat task, pest control.

Fortunately, ours isn't a particularly verminous household. We don't have central heating so there isn't any bug problem in winter and the ants seem content to demolish the garden while leaving the kitchen alone. We haven't even had the entertaining wasps' nest problem which seems to be so popular with Plokta readers. We do however have a very busy, brown, yellow and orange living room carpet.

This is important.

It brings me back to crap cats. The carpet has a shade of brown in it which is exactly the same colour as those huge brown bastards, sorry, spiders. You know the ones I mean. Mike (Scott) was grousing about them in Zorn, before he was assimilated by the Borg cabal. The late night spiders which only show up in a particularly creepy bit of the film or when you least expect them and give you near heart failure every time. They seem particularly prevalent this year. Perhaps Mike has had them all shipped over from Chester? (The one I found dangling by one long leg on the shelf above a vast vat of my bean soup... it really doesn't bear thinking about, does it?) The carpet is great camouflage for them.

I'm not particularly bothered by spiders in general but the big buggers make me a little nervous and they are good at startling me, so when one stalked across the floor during a scary bit of the X-Files, I put my foot down.

Not on the spider. I mean, it is only a spider, even if it is the size of a bloody mouse and it is approaching me with menace. No, I put my foot down near it and the spider scurried with alarming speed under the sofa, I finished watching the television program. Spider is cowering under sofa so I move sofa, with the Sue Mason patented spider catcher in one sweaty little hand. (The spider catcher consists of the bottom of a plastic soft drink bottle and one of Mum's copies of 'Woman's Weekly'. You drop plastic bottle cloche over spider and slide magazine under. Voila! Spider is easily and safely shown the door.) Spider is sat there on the clean patch of carpet which seldom sees the light of day. There is about the same chance of this one camouflaging itself in the brown of the carpet as there would be for a Sherman tank-spider is about the size of a Sherman tank. Along ambles crap cat, wanting to explore patch of fresh carpet. Sniffs at pop bottle cloche and ignores the waving legs of trapped arachnid within in favour of batting a dust ball along the skirting board. Hm, thinks I, people are always telling of how their cat thinks of spider hunting as a fine game. Perhaps if crap cat could be taught to hunt spiders, my delicate heart would be saved from that horrible moment when you see part of the pattern of the carpet move towards you, in a menacing fashion.

"Miaowwww-I'm crap"

Crap cat has brought in other things in the past-the odd rat, mouse, sparrow, pigeon, slug-but I have never witnessed him catching them. I've always suspected that he found the dead ones and that the live ones had committed suicide by flinging themselves into his open mouth while he yawned. And he did once kill a sparrow by sitting on it. I kid you not.

I mean, he's not totally crap. He's very affectionate and very good at sitting on the telephone, cutting you off in mid-sentence to important customers, and very, very good at lying on the keyboard, causing the computer to crash and he has a brilliant purr but he's not really Nimrod the Mighty Hunter. Still, hope springs eternal, so I lift the spider trap and encourage the trapped arachnid to make a run for it. Crap cat licks a paw and ignores beastie. Bugger! Place cloche back over spider, pick up cat, place it nose to spider... Cat, sucker for affection rolls onto side and starts purring. I start to think murderous thoughts. Spider, in desperate attempt to escape from mad woman and mountainous ball of purring fur, starts to scurry off-walking over cat's immense paw. Cat looks down in slightly bemused way then washes paw. Spider reaches skirting board and escapes. Screams of frustration heard as far away as Reading.