I’d never noticed that a garden spider’s third pair of legs is much shorter than the others before.

Marlowe, the cellar spider who has been living behind my beside cabinet for the last 18 months, disappeared a few weeks ago, but I wasn’t too worried as they’d done that before and then turned up again a few weeks later, fatter and of greater span.

On Monday, however, Alex found Marlowe’s mortal remains beneath the bathroom radiator. Marlowe is no more.

Humans share their homes with a surprising number of other species, even discounting the ones they deliberately import to serve as allergen distribution machines. Autumn is a particularly good time to go spotting the spiders that cohabit with us, as many of them are grown fat and sleek on the flies of summer, and are therefore easy to spot.

The cellar spider (Pholcus phalangioides) is sometimes called the daddy long-legs, but unhelpfully, this refers to at least two other whole groups of animals, the harvestmen, and the crane-flies, neither of which are closely related. The confusion this causes is one reason why biologists insist on using Latin names instead.