Arachnophobia

A girl from Scotland was supposed to be staying on my boat for the next three weeks while she did work experience with a publisher in London.

I should have known it wasn't going to work when she said she was bringing her mum with her help her "to settle in" even though she was about 20 years old.

They arrived frazzled after spending all day on the coach, with a ridiculous amount of luggage. Her suitcase was big enough to sleep in and took two of us to lift it. She also had three other bags of stuff. Good lord! She had more stuff with her for three weeks than I owned as a student.

Anyway, they ignored my explicit instructions on how to get to Canary Wharf and ended up lugging all this stuff round Tower Gateway DLR, up stairs and across platforms. They really did not seem very excited to be in London at all.

We took a cab to the boat. I showed them around – the girl was nodding in a vacant manner as I explained where everything was.

But to be honest, her mum was such an appalling dullard that I shouldn't have been surprised that her offspring had no gumption.

I told their blank faces about all the cool things they could do in town, all the museums and galleries, the shows, the cinema, the parks, the sights but all her mum was interested in was where the nearest boot fair was.

Boot fairs? Jesus!

Apparently they go all the time and fill their bags with crap. And, apparently, there is a really good boot fair in Windsor on a Sunday. I explained to them they were quite a long way from Windsor – they were in the East End.

At last, some reaction on their 10-watt faces. "Really?" Mum said (did they not look on a map at where they were going?) "I had no idea. Are there any boot fairs around here?"

When I explained the East End is full of professional types who kit their flats out from John Lewis or old families who probably have nothing they'd want, their faces fell and that was the end of the conversation.

So, as I was leaving, I thought I'd make a joke about hoping they like spiders. I have a couple living on the boat. They are my friends. They spin webs and catch the flies and midges, which are naturally drawn to water.

Ooops. It turns out they HATE spiders.

I asked them not to kill the eight-legged insects and left them to it.

The next morning, the mum rang me up to tell me they were going back to Scotland because "we are terrified of the spiders. We stayed in a hotel last night, which we couldn’t really afford, because we were too scared of the spiders. What would happen if they decided to crawl down my throat in the night!

"We went camping once but we had to go home straight away because there were grasshoppers."

Unbelievable. To come all this way. To lug all that stuff. To give up the opportunity to be in the capital for three weeks (a blessed escape from that insipid, feeble-headed mother) and work in a publishers doing your dream job all because of a couple of spiders. What a twat.

Her mum also said she wanted to go to New York but was afraid of something which I didn’t quite hear, but whatever it was also prevents her from watching anything about the place on television. Maybe it was hot dog stands or the Statue Of Liberty, or something.

Or maybe she was scared of her shadow.

Cripes! What's that? Oh, it's me!