Aug 22. The Deadly Dawn Encounter.

Australia is knee-deep in the deadliest snakes and spiders in the world. To be Australian is to spend your waking hours locked in a grim battles to the death with ferocious snakes that lunge from every cupboard, sinking fangs the size of crowbars into your eyes and pumping nuclear poison straight to your heart. There are spiders too. Stealth spiders, sadistic spiders, commando spiders with raw cunning. Spiders the size of rugs. Spiders with hell-black souls that leap from the darkness and bite into your veins, paralysing you in seconds. Spiders that know you may run, hide and fight, but eventually you must sleep, and then they will creep along the ceiling, take aim, and drop on to you, silently, under cover of darkness...

None of this is even remotely true. Yet every time British people discuss Australia, someone mentions snakes and spiders in tones of abject horror. I'm not sure why we Brits have this demented attitude. Perhaps it's the cumulative effect of a thousand nature progs with titles like 'Nasty Things That Lurk In Other Countries And Can Kill You'. We seem to get lots of these, often featuring 'reconstructions' in the style of vintage Hitchcock.

It's also a problem of perspective. Here in Britain, all our spiders are harmless wimps. You can go up to any British spider, spit in its face, spill its drink and scratch your keys down the side of its car, and it will just slink away. Snakes? The textbooks say we have three species of which one, the adder, has a nasty bite. In reality, you just never see them. There are probably about seven in the whole country, all asleep in a fen somewhere in Norfolk, and about as worrying as fresh air. So when we hear of a country with genuinely deadly creatures in it, we over-react and imagine that daily life must be a series of near-fatal encounters.

All of which is by way of preamble to what happened to me at 5.49am on the morning of Friday, August 22nd, 2003...

My host, Peter Rodgers, was going to drive us both to Canberra to attend the Skeptics Conference, and this necessitated an unpleasantly early start. I rose at about 5.40am, went into the bathroom, and prepared to take a shower. I just happened to turn towards the bathroom sink and... there it was.

There was no rational sequence of awareness, evaluation and response. I just turned towards the sink and then, as if instantaneously, I was standing six feet further away, comprehensively oblivious to anything else in the universe except the creature.

I think the creature triggered an ancient bit of survival circuitry, burned by billions of years of evolution into the 'autopilot' part of my brain. It's a circuit that bypassed higher mental faculties in favour of instant and potentially life-saving response. I suppose it started with incoming signals from peripheral vision, which matched some pre-defined criteria for Red Alert based on size, shape, darkness, texture and position. This triggered a hot-wired nerve impulse direct to fast-twitch muscle fibres in my legs.

After a few seconds, my conscious awareness caught up with events. I knew I was staring at a spider. It was large by UK standards. I don't have a spider phobia, but I had no way of knowing if this guy was harmless or if he could kill me stone dead.

Peter was somewhere in the other half of his mansion. Time was passing, and we had a schedule to stick to. I needed to get showered, dressed and packed. What to do?

I went to my room and got a card box. This is a rectangular box of clear moulded plastic, consisting of a base and a close-fitting lid. Magicians tend to have these lying around. Armed with my plastic box and a piece of stiff paper, I returned to face the creature.

It had moved, but not much. I held the inch-deep plastic base of the card box in my left hand, and the piece of stiff paper in my right. With slow, careful movements, I extended the moulded plastic base of the box towards the creature. My eyes were rivetted to the creature's outline. All I was aware of was dark shape, white tile, dark shape, white tile... my brain checking and re-checking the visual input for any sign of change.

My hand was just a few inches away now. It was time for that rapid, final lunge of   imprisonment. I felt an ice-cold determination to execute this single, flawless motion and seal the spider in its plastic prison. My hand shot forward in a defiant act of now-or-never resolve. I heard the satisfying 'tap' as the plastic contacted the tiled surface. I had it!

The spider could not escape. Five sides of its existence were hard, moulded plastic. The sixth was hard, white bathroom tile. I knew that at that moment, no force in this life could weaken the grip I had on that plastic box lid.

I fed the stiff paper between the plastic box and the tiled wall. The spider scrambled a little, but could not escape. With infinite care, aware this was possibly a lethal creature, I relocated both prison and prisoner to the horizontal surface right of the sink. I inverted the arrangement, so that the stiff paper was now the ceiling of the arachnid's confinement. With a smooth manouevre, I substituted the plastic lid for the stiff paper, and slid it home. I had captured the spider! Four rubber bands further secured the spider in its hard, plastic jail.

Later that day, several friends confirmed the truth for me. It was a Huntsman spider.

Completely harmless.

You could sit naked in a bath full of them, and come to no harm whatsoever.

If you want to see the spider, the detailed close-up photographs are here.

The rest of the day was comparatively straightforward! Peter Rodgers, myself and all the skeptics travelled to Canberra for the first day of the Australian Skeptics 2003 National Convention, hosted by Canberra Skeptics Inc at the CSIRO Centre (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation). I did a quickie radio interview to hype the event, and in the afternoon the Convention itself got under way with a couple of good presentations. In the evening there was a typically convivial session of food, beers and chat, followed by a debate about 'alternative health care' scams.

Spider Epilogue: I took my spider to show to my friends at the Convention. Peter Rodgers noted that we were crossing state lines, from NSW to ACT, so this transportation of the spider might constitute an illegal act. In Canberra, I was told how harmless the spider was (sometimes with a little too much relish, I thought). Eventually I set him free in the grounds of the CSIRO Centre. Sadly, it must have been too cold for him. He was still there the next day, somewhat glassy and lifeless. He became a study specimen for my friend Lynne Kelly, a spider fan, who took him home to Melbourne. Crossing state lines again.

Aug 23 - 24. Saint, Rapper And Bear.

I spent the weekend very happily enjoying the Skeptics Convention, meeting fandabadoozy people and seeing some excellent presentations. I will confine myself to a few highlights.

Below left is Vicki Moss, the conference Convenor and Secretary. Vicki could run the United Nations in her spare time. Vicki solves problems, gets things done, puts up with everyone's weird requests and somehow remains calm (well, calm-ish), modest and endlessly helpful. She is the human duct tape without which the Convention would have fallen apart before it even began. In short, a saint. And one with a nice smile.

Annie Warburton (above right) gave one of the best presentations of the entire Conference, and the only one which included a self-penned rap, delivered acapella to a stunned, bemused and highly delighted crowd. Annie is smart, funny, pacy, persuasive and entertaining, and seems to tackle everything she touches with terrific flair. Her description of herself in the Convention programme is well worth a read, and conveys just how wonderful she is.

Lynne Kelly gave two presentations, which was good news because she's brilliant. She can manage to make any subject interesting. Lynne used to be a full-time teacher, and I wish she'd been my teacher when I was at school. I might actually have learned something.

My small contribution to the proceedings was to round off the Saturday schedule with my 'Mind Power' lecture show.

I felt a greater than usual responsibility to perform well, given that these lovely people had flown me several million miles (or whatever it is to Australia) to watch me strut my stuff. They seemed to like what I did, and they were a great audience, which always helps.

Saturday evening was given over to a hugely enjoyable dinner, during which I was able to renew my acquaintance with SkeptoBear.

SkeptoBear is a very friendly and well-travelled bear who attends conferences on skeptical matters, usually taking his friend Alynda Brown with him. SkeptoBear has impressively clean white fur, which hasn't come out too well on the above photo. After the main business of eating, drinking and chatting there was time for some fun, so Peter Rodgers, Steve Walker and myself entertained the tables with informal close-up magic. This is great fun for magicians to do, and it was a pleasure to work with Peter and Steve.

The next and final day of the Conference involved more excellent lectures, interspersed with more opportunities to meet and chat with a range of interesting people. That's the great thing about these kinds of meetings - more or less anyone could turn up, and more or less anyone usually does.

> > > Continued in Part 5

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