Through the glass of the BBC’s rather lovely building in Salford, you can see the waters of the Manchester Ship Canal gradually easing past.

Manchester United looms in the distance but, a lot nearer, is something even more fascinating. Spiders. Lots of them.

They’ve made a mass of cobwebs across the huge windows and slowly move around during the course of the day.

When you first see them, they’re scrunched up in balls but every now and then they get a burst of energy, stretch out their legs and wander round their webs.

I confess I stare at them, entranced. This may be because I get up at about 3.50am to go into work, so by the time the sun’s coming up I’m in a state of sleep-deprived lunacy, but I prefer to imagine I’m watching the wonders of nature at work.

Once in a blue moon some little fly will snag itself in the web and – whoosh – over comes the spider and tucks in. Or, as happened the other day, it comes rushing over, picks up the fly and then drops it by accident. I’d swear the spider looked at me through the window and shrugged in disappointment.

At that point, we were both clearly dreaming of a decent breakfast.

I don’t mind spiders, which is just as well because there appears to be a bumper crop of them knocking round the place this year. The mild weather is apparently dream conditions for our eight-legged chums and they’ve been making merry.

The warm, dry weather means there are more little bugs around for them to eat while all these open windows and doors mean they’ve been able to grab shelter in our houses. Yup. In our houses.

No, wait. Stop screaming and put down that slipper. You are not to go round squashing spiders until I’ve put the other side of the story.

For one thing – the worst creature to have in your house is a fly, right? They really are annoying, what with their potential to carry disease and eating horrible things and then walking on your meal. Not to mention that interminable buzzing noise.

So what’s the cure for flies? Simple. A spider. Spiders hate flies even more than you and I do. They hate them so much they catch them, kill them and eat them. Get a decent spider or two in your life and your fly problems will be (possibly – I’m not a pest control professional) a thing of the past.

Still not convinced. Well think of them as fun and friendly mini-beasts, like they do at the zoo, with an amusing array of legs and eyes.

If you can stomach it, let one walk on your arm and you’ll suddenly discover it’s not all that horrible.

And please don’t worry about these ridiculous stories of dangerous spiders biting people.  The chances of you getting hospitalised by a spider in this country are just about zero, whatever the Daily Star might suggest. That said, if you come across a False Widow you might want to leave it alone.

No, I ask you politely to cut them some slack. They’re lovely to look at, with a variety of shapes and colours and they’re interesting little beasties to watch.

To be fair, I wouldn’t want a spider as a pet,  because I think the best pets are ones you can cuddle. Tarantulas may be many things, but they’re not cuddly.

We do get the occasional big ‘un in this country. It’s not so long since a Brazilian Wandering Spider crawled out of a banana box at a Co-Op in Kent and a few years ago a rally car imported into Belfast from Australia turned out to have come complete with its own Huntsman spider.

In my youth, I worked briefly at a banana warehouse in Borehamwood where there were endless stories about giant spiders turning up and having to be caught or flattened. I’m almost sure none of them were true, but they became a sort of folklore.

Maybe that’s where our national spider mistrust comes from – a century of scared banana workers.

So please be nice to them. They catch flies, they spin beautiful bits of art (a cobweb glistening in the early morning dew, or coated with a gentle frost . . .) and they end up feeding hungry birds.

These are little natural marvels, who deserve a lot better than being squished under a shoe or washed away down the plughole.

And if you do persist in bashing them then just take this warning – one day you may wake up to discover the insects have taken over the world. And, just like Father Christmas, they’ll know who’s been good to them. Come the arachnid revolution, my friends, will you be safe?

I was on a train the other day with no phone, no newspaper and no book.

There was nothing to read, no other entertainment than my own brain. It took me back to my youth. Back then, you would frequently find yourself sitting somewhere, watching the world go by undisturbed by anyone or any machine.

You’d soak in the sounds, the smells and hear snatches of conversation and kill time by making up your own games. And sometimes you’d just get bored. Now we are reliant upon technology to keep our brains switched on and  inform us of everything going on.

We are becoming a nation of computer gamers – with middle-aged people playing more than any other age group. Where once gaming seemed the preserve of teenagers, now it is 40-somethings (men and women) with smartphones who seem to play the most.

For some things, of course, the constant expansion of technology is great – the ability to keep in touch with family, to ask for assistance, to avoid getting lost and to get help is undeniably a benefit.

But we lose something if we never get bored. Because that’s when your brain starts to wander and great ideas permeate.

But not, I fear, if you’re busy playing CandyCrush.