My pain-in-the-neck son

Seeing my oldest son, Master20, causes me pain these days.

While it was good to see the big man again when he popped home for the weekend, I have to say I haven’t been the same since he was here.

The reason for this is I took him for a drive so he could checkout the venue for his 21st party next month. We were driving home, chatting away, when suddenly he screamed, much like the Wilhelm Scream, only louder and only two feet from my ear.

Now one thing you don’t want, when you’re travelling on a busy road going slightly above the suggested limit, is someone to scare the living bejeebers out of you, making you jerk the car into the lane of the oncoming traffic (fortunately, in this case, the oncoming traffic had just passed us, but it was a near thing and I’m going for dramatic effect here).

While I was jerking the car to the right, every muscle in my body decided to give rigor mortis a trial run and snapped stiff, then my neck & head shot to my left to see who we’d killed while my mind hoped, despite the rigor mortis thing, it wasn’t us.

Only to find Master20 slapping at his knees like he was engaged in some kids’ clapping game and was about to break into Miss Mary Mack.

“What the-?” I began.

“A spider,” he yelled. “There’s a spider!”

“Are you shitting me!?” I asked him soothingly at the top of my lungs. “You scared the shit out of me. I literally think I need to change my pants because my body thought we’d died and emptied my bowels.”

“It was huge!” he stammered. Then he found the dead spider and, holding out his palm, showed me the gigantic beast of a thing which could have doubled for Aragog in the Harry Potter films. We both stared at the baby pea-sized body. “Well, I’m telling you,” insisted Master20, “it was a lot bigger with its legs stretched out.”

I bet.

“I’m not even scared of spiders,’ insisted Master20 when we were back at the house.

“Brace yourself, son,” I told him. “I’ve got some bad news for you.”

It was only later that day I realized, in snapping my head around, I’d messed up a bunch of clenched muscles in my neck, shoulder and back of my skull, and it began to hurt like hell.

And here’s the thing – until Sunday, I wasn’t scared of spiders either. But after the damage the last one did to my body, I think I am now.