A Spider’s Quest for Fame

And rhymes

Spincy Spider, written and illustrated by Herminder Ohri

When I was a little boy, I was certain that one day I was going to be famous. Like other little boys, all I saw on TV or in films or heard on the radio were famous faces and voices and names. All the papers carried was news of famous people. Famous people sang all the songs, were in all the films and programmes. I knew that I would be famous, because most of the names I knew were famous ones. The adults around me weren’t conventionally famous, I supposed, but I knew who they were. And so did everyone else I knew. Thus they were famous, too, in a way. It was elementary common sense.

At primary school, many, many years ago, there was a bit of a buzz made once about the world of work. At secondary school, of course, there would be more. That was the real time for propaganda: the real location of activity days where you sat in computer labs and answered questionnaires about jobs you were apt to get. Or worked at terrible email simulator games where you did a mediocre job like everyone else’s job.

That all arrived later. But in primary school, there was still a touch of effort made. I remember another boy and I doing something vaguely musical in a session that was a little like show and tell. He played one song on the trumpet and I played another on the keyboard, both at the same time. I imagine we thought the two songs would go together, like different instruments in the same band gel together when they’re on stage. It did not gel together. It did not sound good. But I remember that afternoon because of something my teacher said to me, or rather said about me. She said she could imagine me being a big musician in the future — perhaps with slightly longer hair. And I thought, as I was apt to think, then, that it sounded both reasonable and likely. Yes, that’s how I will become famous, I thought, as of course I eventually will.

I didn’t think much about fame after that. But it’s odd how vague impressions from extreme youth recur to you. I suppose, until I went away to university and realised I was like everyone else, just more so, I still imagined I might one of these days discover in myself a talent that would make some measure of fame unavoidable. Even though, I had realised, I didn’t want to be famous at all.

Actually, fame sounded like a terrible deal. You might get rich, certainly, but it would come at the cost of your privacy, your capacity to do stupid things without everyone in the world hearing about it. Your equilibrium, your mind.

After all, weren’t the famous people in the papers and on TV constantly crashing their cars while drunk and their marriages while both drunk and sober? How many happy people whose faces you recognised stared out at you from tabloid front pages? Not many.

Nowadays, you’d have to pay me — actively pay me, and pay me millions — for me even to contemplate fame half-seriously. That would be the only way it might seem worthwhile. I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want anyone to know the first thing about me. When I die I want to be near-instantly forgotten, like the man in that poem by Pope.

That said, as this book for children indicates, the fame bug still remains among the young. Like many children, the protagonist here thinks he will be famous. Even though he is a spider, he thinks he will be famous. He tells all the other insect characters out there in nature that he will be famous, so famous they make up a nursery rhyme about him, like other famous spiders of the past.

But the creatures of the outdoors are a little confused. What is it to be famous? they ask. What is ‘famous’ at all? And when they find out what fame is, and what you have to do to get it, the spider is somewhat saddened. He would have to do something extraordinary, or at least notorious, in order to get his name out there. In order to win his laurels.

In the course of this story, naturally, he does just that: our spider is brave and noble and good and all the rest; and he does — spoiler here — get to become famous, as was his initial wish. And he learns the lesson that it is better to do the right thing for the right reasons, irrespective of whether it might give you fame — although, undermining the lesson a little, in this case Fortune smiles upon our little spider and grants him fame regardless.

But this is the wrong lesson for children to learn from the story of a spider’s quest for fame. The right lesson, of course, is that fame is a bad, bad thing, and when the spider learnt how hard it was to become famous, he ought to have clicked his heels together (if spiders have eight heels at the ends of their legs) and thanked the universe at large for his good luck in being known by no one on earth save for his friends.