21 March 2010
So the truth of the business is that Lister is anxious to assert that it had been communicated to Mr Wray first by Mr Hulse, and Mr Wray had asked Mr Lister to confirm it, which he was able to do from observations made by himself before he had heard of those of Mr Hulse. On 22 November 1668 Mr Lister was studying the ‘craftsmanship’ of some several spiders known to him, when suddenly the one he was observing stopped what it was doing, bent backwards, pointed its anus up into the wind, and ‘shot forth a thread’ as does a ‘lusty lad expel urine from his swollen bladder’. The thread stretched out for ‘many ells’ waving in the air, then the spider herself, to the greater astonishment of Mr Lister, jumped onto it and was swept away on it over the trees.

Today the sky over the sea and the land is filled with small cumulus clouds, gridded horizontally and diagonally in streets, with cirrus and some contrails higher still, in the blue above that. We walked from Hoist Covert out through the wood then up along the edge of the higher ground to the north, to sit on the benches, first by the concrete pill-box near where the nightingales sing, then at the top of the slope overlooking the whole view, the reed beds of the Dingle Marshes, the sea to the left, Sizewell beyond Dunwich ahead, the windmill stump to ...