I’m used to house spiders/giant house spiders and daddy-longlegs spiders taking up residency in the house and I’ll also occasionally see the smaller hard-to-spot spiders like money and zebra spiders, but in my bedroom today I saw a spider I didn’t recognise in both the way it looked and behaved
It was about 1-2 cm long and of a sleeker-build than a house spider, but not as sleek as a daddy-longlegs. It’s four front legs were forward facing (compared to a house spider whose legs splay out).
When I saw it it was on the light fitting and it lowered itself on a thread near to, but not on to, the floor, then went back up to the light taking the thread with it. It did this about 2-3 times. I am guessing it must of somehow fired the thread a good 2m to the wall above my bed as it started to crawl along a thread to that point.
I decided I didn’t particularly want it lowering itself onto my head, so I lightly-poked it with a crutch I still had from when I injured my knee. Its first reaction was to actually turn on the crutch, as if to confront it head-on, even though it was much smaller than the crutch. It then fell onto the bed and as I tried to push it off with the crutch it hid itself in a small folds in the bed clothes. When I exposed the spider and tried to prod it again with crutch to encourage it to scamper off the bed, it curled up like it had died, it did this a couple of times before more prods made it realize it was fooling no-one and it scampered away.
My first reaction was that it might be a false-widow, hence the use of the crutch (I understand false-widows are much more bitey than your average British spider and also have a bite comparable to a wasp’s sting), but its abdomen was not that bulbous, certainly not any larger than a house spider’s in comparison to the rest of its body.
It is now safely ensconced somewhere in the corner of my room after a few hours later crawling from under the bed onto my pillow, only to be launched across the room on the said pillow.