Spider Sense

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I was filling up at the petrol station at Biwmaris this afternoon in preparation for my drive up to Stretton tomorrow to pick Jane up from her visit to see her family, when I noticed there was a resident arachnid behind the glass of the pump I was using: pictured above. Oddly, my immediate thought was what on earth does the spider make of its current micro universe? Below [it] a constant flux of movement and activity in place of solid ground, and above [it] a largely fixed, glowing orange sky with odd clouds that occasionally flicker across it in some apparently pre-ordained fashion. What can the creature make of the the other inordinately large, shadowy 'creatures', that from time to time appear from nowhere beneath it; or do they appear as earth movements or roiling seas? And how is it that these gross movements appear to have no effect on the stability of repose of the spider from its own [gravitationally perpendicular] viewpoint? Much as in Edwin Abbot's "Flatland" of the 19th C. or A.K. Dewdney's "The Planiverse" of the early 1980s - based itself on the former work - and although not in itself in any way two-dimensional, the spider in the petrol pump nevertheless must experience life in a world that appears to admit the existence of ghosts which come and go as fleeting as the angular black clouds that move about its tangerine dreaming sky, punctuated only by the earth tremor thud of the petrol pump nozzle at the start and end of each filled tank. Just a thought...

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