One nice, mild, sunny day in Spring, little Miss Muffet left her parents’ home and skipped gaily into the local woods to find her favourite spot, in order to eat her curds and whey.

In fact, so engrossed was she upon slurping down her curds and whey, that she did not even notice that a great big spider had emerged from the bushes and come to sit down beside her, as she perched upon her tuffet.

A certain silence, or sixth sense, however, finally caused our Miss Muffet to look up through her bouncy little curls - and there the gangly, chitinous reality of the spider, in all his awful eight-leggedness, met her startled, terrified gaze.

Miss Muffet, of course, let out a piercing scream, and prepared to run for it, back to the fortress of her safe little home and the ever-comforting arms of Mummy. But in her panic she dropped everything, spoon, dish and all. It was only the concern that Mummy might be cross if she lost these utensils that made her hesitate, when the spider called out to her.

‘Miss Muffet, Miss Muffet,’ he called, in a funny little clicking voice, as spiders do not really have mouths like you or I. And he reached out with one of his sinuous, hairy legs.

‘Don’t forget your spoon,’ he intoned syrupally. ‘Miss Muffet.’

A certain righteous anger at this familiarity filled our little heroine. ‘How did you know my name?’ she demanded.

‘Well,’ said the spider, delighted in catching the attention of the little girl. ‘You see, I am actually rather more intelligent than you might think! I had an education too, you know.’

‘And,’ he added portentously, creeping just a little bit closer, but not enough, of course, to really frighten Miss Muffet all over again. ‘I know how the nursery rhyme goes too, just as well as you do, in fact. So there!’

‘Well, of course, I never meant to imply...’ began Miss Muffet, somewhat stuffily - but the spider cut her off.

‘Anyway, Miss Muffet,’ he drawled, then correcting himself after perceiving the indignant expression on the latter’s face. ‘If I may address you thus, then I would like to just ask you: why is it that you run away from me, according to the nursery rhyme?’

Now being a remarkably well brought up little girl, this question actually put Miss Muffet very much on the spot. How was she to answer this question, without actually offending the guy? Mummy had always lectured her at great length about the need for nice little girls to be sensitive towards the feelings of other people and even, well, spiders could of course have feelings too.

Soon, however, inspiration came to her. Her mother, she explained carefully to him, had always warned her not to talk to strangers.

‘After all,’ she reminded him, as she warmed to her subject, ‘you might try to offer me sweets, or flash at me or something, by suddenly taking off your raincoat... or for that matter, you... you could be a Satanist...’

‘But I haven’t you tried to offer you sweets yet, have I?’ retorted the spider. ‘And just because of the way I look... Nor indeed, have I tried to take off my raincoat, if in fact, I could afford to have one.’ A bitter look appeared fleetingly in his expression as he said this, looking down at his many feet.

Miss Muffet could only concede that this was true. Of course, it also had to be admitted that it must be very difficult to find a raincoat which would actually, truly fit him, let alone... but at this point, she realised she had said something wrong, and a dangerous glint came into the spider’s jewelled eyes.

‘I mean,’ she faltered, as the spider drawled a long ‘yaas?’ ‘I mean, er...’

‘You mean,’ intoned the spider, ‘where would I find a coat that has eight legs. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’

As Miss Muffet got more and more flustered he reared up on his back pair of legs, waving his front legs in an extraordinarily alarming manner, so much so that you could hardly have failed not to notice them. His mandibles clicked and hissed as his elongated head twisted closer to Miss Muffet’s dainty curls.

‘What you mean,’ he grinded out ‘is that it would be difficult to find a coat that had eight legs. Not just with room for two lousy arms, but all eight of my obscenely hairy appendages, that you see here before your very eyes, in all their glory. That is what you mean, isn’t it!’

‘But that is not what I meant!’ cried Miss Muffet. It’s not that I think you are being in-your-face with your eight legs at all, I don’t mind at all really, it’s just that...’

‘You don’t fancy me!’ finished the spider with a catch in his throat. He lay on his back sobbing, all those gangling limbs weaving and straggling in the air. They did not quite manage to conceal his somewhat large, velvety abdomen and the discretely protruding sting, although Miss Muffet tried avert her eyes away from the sight. It still held a somewhat horrified fascination for her, as the spider caroused in front of her, though she tried religiously to keep her eyes off it. The spider, however, seemed to notice her somewhat critical observation, and then a new mood hardened his voice. He lurched up on all eight of his legs again and faced her.

‘You pretend to be so damn liberal,’ he chided her. ‘But I bet you are just the sort of person who only judges people according to the number of legs they happen to have been born with.’

Miss Muffet, however, was made of stronger stuff and not so easily intimidated, it came from being from a family blessed with a long line of social workers and teachers.

‘Well,’ she gathered herself, deciding that such an obvious chip on one’s shoulder over what was, after all, over something perfectly natural, must needs be confronted and addressed explicitly. ‘I can appreciate it must be difficult for you being somewhat more blessed with legs than is the traditional norm.’

‘However,’ she continued, somewhat sententiously, ‘you know, you should try to take pride in your eight-leggedness. Accept it as a valid part of you!’

The spider perked up at this. ‘So you will come with me for dinner tonight?’ he breathed eagerly, being thankfully unaware of his own faux pas (he did not really intend to have her for dinner, of course).

‘Erm, well, no, said Miss Muffet, not wishing her generous motives to be misunderstood. ‘I’m sure we will meet again for another chat again some time, but you know, I have to wash my hair tonight.’

Downcast again, the spider started to mutter morosely. ‘You two-legged people are all the same,’ he accused her. ‘You have no idea about what it is really like for us.’

‘Now stop being so self-pitying,’ Miss Muffet told him roundly, beginning to get a little impatient with him. ‘I can see you are intelligent, and you know as well as I do, there are excellent training schemes on offer now, to anyone who is...’ Luckily, she bit off the adjective she could have used, she did not want to antagonise him any further: he was, after all, a spider, whilst she was just a little girl who was, at this moment, alone with him... ‘Why,’ she reminisced, ‘just the other day, my daddy told me that the lowliest maggot can always transform, go onto greater things, in fact some of them even go on to become fully-fledged policemen.’ In full stride, the added: ‘in fact, there is even a cockroach, yes, indeed, a cockroach - working in one of the kitchens of one of the best-known chains of hotels in Europe, and...’

But her tirade was broken off.

‘Bill!’ crooned a husky new tone, from someway to the north of the wood. ‘Biilllll!!!!’

Bill had gone rigid, and he now began to look very small and scared, as his over-sized limbs started to fold in protectively over his body. ‘Omigod,’ he muttered to himself, looking for possible avenues of escape. Yet Miss Muffet could not help noticing that somehow, he seemed very excited and happy too, as his little sting elongated a little. Omigod, the spider breathed again.

‘Spider,’ cried Miss Muffet, in increasing concern. ‘Whatever is the matter?? I’m supposed to run away from you in the nursery rhyme, not you run away from me!!!’

Suddenly the spider came back to the present, but somehow, he still now looked defeated and seedy. ‘Look,’ he hissed at her. ‘It’s the wife.’

‘She’s bloody hungry right now, and in this mood I dare say she’ll eat me alive.’ So’ he added menacingly to Miss Muffet. ‘If she asks, you have not seen me. OK?’ And with that, he scampered off, in his ungainly way, leaving little bits of web behind him in a scattered trail as he ran.

Miss Muffet was in the process of picking up her dish and her spoon, ready to push on home after this little adventure, when a great big female spider suddenly emerged from behind the tuffet and sat down beside her. Miss Muffet felt somewhat intimidated by the close proximity of the spider - she really was, much bigger and heavier than Bill had been, with a grossly distended, swollen abdomen - but she was no longer quite as impressed by spiders as she had once been. She was not so sure, however, when the spider gave her a gossamer brush of one of her front legs against her pink little cheek and soft, fair curls. It gave her a nasty, icky, uneasy feeling, that something here was not quite right.

‘Well, now my pretty,’ she crooned, looking deeply into Miss Muffet’s small irises with her multi-faceted jewelled eyes. Her oversized head leant uncomfortably closer to Miss Muffet’s own, her antennae disconcertingly twitching above her generous mandibles, and the former was reminded of an excerpt from a nasty film she had once seen, where similar creatures laid their eggs inside human beings whilst they were asleep. ‘Have you seen my Bill? I do believe I heard you conversing just a little while ago.’

Miss Muffet’s inadvertent glance at the web traces leading towards the woods, clearly showed the newcomer all she needed to know. But just before she lumbered off to find her prey, she still had a few words of warning for little Miss Muffet.