Now, to spiders of the scary sort, not the drink sort, following Evan Bailey’s directions (C8 Tuesday) for catching huntsmen with a bowl. Natasha Lee of Alexandria confesses: “I once used a takeaway container to catch a huntsman. I didn’t fully secure the lid and asked my husband, upstairs, to take it outside to release. Meanwhile, our cat had pushed the container to the ground. When we came downstairs, I saw the empty container and the huntsman run up my leg and bit me in retaliation. A painful lesson learnt.”

Glenna Coxhill of Orange has tangled with huntsmen as well, and adds, “When we lived out of town, our coats hung on a peg just inside the back door. I took mine down and saw a huntsman on a sleeve. I stepped outside and brushed him off. When I turned to go back inside I saw him beat me in.”

A quick word from Dorothy Barnes of Armidale, confirming the oddly named drink, “I well remember the joy of bodgie bloods at the Paragon Café in West Wyalong during the hot summers of the 1960s. I especially remember the time when our Great Aunty Mill was with us and she asked us to order for her because, although she enjoyed bodgie bloods, she could not bring herself to utter the word in public.”

Then again to meetings, John Crowe of Cherrybrook recalls talking to a friendly woman in a supermarket in Thornleigh then meeting her in a shop in Tokyo four days later.

Helen Jeffery of Wahroonga says, “When my husband retired we embarked on a trip around Australia in 1989 in our four-wheel drive. Outside Alice Springs we saw an orange VW kombi van stuck in sand in the Finke River and four young men trying to dig it out. My husband attached our snap strap to it and our sturdy Daihatsu Rocky pulled it out. The man steering the kombi got out, looked at my husband and said, ‘Hello Dr Jeffery, you pulled me out once now you’ve done it again’. He’d been delivered at Parramatta hospital 20 years before and the family were patients.”

A different slant comes from David Sayers of Gwandalan, who says, “My daughter Elizabeth, in Albury, has a dog named Max the Groodle, who has his own Facebook page. They recently had a week in Manly. Back in Albury, a woman came up to them at their favourite coffee shop and asked if they had recently been in Manly. She had recognised Max.”

Column8@smh.com.au

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