Unexpected guests in Lavapies

The title is a bit of a misnomer, no guests (be they roaches or leering drunks) in Lavapies are 'unexpected', even if they are unwelcome. Over the past week I have found a spider in my sugar bowl and just now another in my bed.....aaaarrgghhh... It's bad enough to find spiders, but especially in the stuff you eat and the place you sleep. Worse still, the latter beastie seems to think I am edible. A week ago I woke up with a really swollen and immovable arm that was literally agony to the touch and really hard to move, right in the centre of it was a little bite. This made my memory fleetingly jump back to an unfortunate summer camp incident in Loeches where my fellow camp leader was supposedly bitten by a common spider and rendered completely paralysed for 2 weeks. Anyway, back to my own immovable arm, I dismissed the spider idea, reminding myself that in the UK we have some enormous spiders but had never heard of anyone being bitten by one, I thought it was probably some sort of winter mosquito bite or something despite Spanish people's assurances that it was a spider... Anyway, about 10 minutes ago I changed my bed linen and was greeted by a sizeable arachnid who seemed to be camping out in my bed (I'm sorry to tell you I crushed it with a hairbrush). So, it looks like house spiders do bite, and that you can have quite nasty allergic reactions to them. I wonder how many more of these little nasties are lurking?  Luckily Madrid spidies are no bigger than a 50-pence piece, but still, they're not my ideal flatmates. And don't give me any of that spiders are our friends/they eat flies/they are more afraid of us than we are of them bu"& sh%* - I have a brain that is bigger than a grain of salt, so I'm sure I can feel fear much more astutely than a hairy sesame seed with 8 legs ;-)