Hallowe'en Part II - The Best Nightmare Ever!

So for eight evenings straight over Hallowe'en (Saturday to Saturday), we were at Phobophobia, The London Bridge Experience, with the reptiles.

Our usual rules didn't apply: here, our job was to make people face their fears - or even scare them. For once, people had to approach the reptiles and go past if they wanted to carry on; we weren't going to step back and keep them out of their way! After all, the public weren't going to say to the actor chasing them with a chainsaw "I'm frightened; please take that away" ....

We were in two areas - lizards, millipedes and one small snake in the first room, Brownlow, with one handler, and the bulk of the snakes (including at least one Burmese python) in Romans, an "encampment", a little further on with two handlers. The idea was that Emma and I would take alternate night to be alone in Brownlow, joining Luc in Romans on the other nights. Emma did the first night and half of the third, but it became clear that lizards and millipedes weren't behaving for  her, so from mid-way through the third night I kept them in line .....

Yes, I had people trying to decide if I was human or a mannequin; I even had one person stroke my arm. One man, trying to scare his friends, said "Just you wait, she's going to move any second" - and when I did, he screamed! "I didn't think you would! I only said it to frighten the rest of them!"

But I also had people thrilled to meet them. One person told me he'd always wanted to see a real live snake, and that afternoon he'd been to the zoo and seen one - at a distance, behind glass. Now he had the chance to touch one. And every night I had people who were very frightened, who touched a snake for the first time and realised it wasn't anything like what they expected.

Bruce the bearded dragon received a lot of attention and was generally loved - but as it was pretty dark, he held onto my shirt and slept through it all.

In fact, faced with a Royal python, a bearded dragon, and a ten-inch millipede, it was the millipede that most people were scared of.

But what really made the week for me was the acceptance we had from the London Bridge Experience staff. It would have been very easy for them to think of us as outsiders - we were, after all, brought in as a self-contained team just for the week - but we were welcomed, made to feel at home, befriended, and looked after.

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And, of course, I was working (more or less) full time Monday to Friday - the more or less bit being that my boss agreed to me taking half a day off spread over the five days, so I was able to leave work about 40 minutes early each day. But still, I was getting up at 05:45, feeding the cat, checking and responding to emails, leaving home before 07:00, working until 16:00, arriving at TLBE at 17:00, starting the sessions there at 18:00 (earlier on certain days), working until 22:30 or later, packing up the animals, driving home, arriving home some time after 23:30, checking the animals and putting them away, then going to bed, to start all over again a few hours later .... And I loved it! I'm hoping for a repeat booking in 2014.