For weeks, they have been the bane of our lives. Flying across the living room every evening, getting stuck behind the curtains and being pursued relentlessly by our cat.

I thought it was just us - that our house had been chosen as the UK reproduction centre for them. But to my relief, I learned at the weekend that their presence in our house is down to a nationwide invasion. We are, it appears, not the only home in the country to be inundated with daddy-longlegs.

I have never seen so many Big Daddies, or BDs, my daughters call them. Barely a night goes by when I don't have to capture and free at least two of them from bedrooms or the bathroom. Armed with a duster, I try to gently pick them up - not easy given their extreme fragility and the screams and shrieks of the children every time the insect moves.

While my husband has and always will be the Chief Spider Remover, the role of Chief Daddy Longlegs Extractor has been foisted upon me. Bizarrely, he is able to pick up spiders the size of tennis balls, but calls for me to get rid of daddy-longlegs.

"I can't bear their legs touching my skin," he says, which I find a little puzzling as the feeling of hairy spiders' legs creeping across flesh has to be the worst thing, second only to having your head bitten off by a Great White Shark.

Spiders do, however, make better house guests, keeping to their nooks and crannies under skirting boards during the day, appearing at night only briefly, to scuttle from A to B.

Whereas the BDs make no attempt to hide and swoop low across the room, sometimes fluttering hideously across your face like pieces of thread.

I only realised how many we were harbouring when I indulged in a rare spot of vacuuming at the weekend and came across a BD's graveyard behind the sofa. It was not a pretty sight, long legs twisted hideously around bodies. Worse still, when I attempted to suck them up into the Hoover nozzle, they became stuck in the lip and I had to manually remove them.

I felt better once the job was done. One or two were encased in cobwebs and were clearly ending their days as a grotesque autumn feast for spiders. It was horrible to think that, as we had relaxed on the sofa watching TV, a gruesome invasion of the body snatchers was taking place only inches away.

The hot sunshine and heavy rain is thought to be to blame for the invasion and, horrifyingly, if the weather stays mild, the insects could be around for weeks to come. That means more nights frantically trying to stop our cat from knocking over lamps, vases and glasses of wine as he leaps about trying to grab them.

I learned only while writing this column that they are not actually called daddy-longlegs, that it is a nickname. They are, in fact, crane flies - something I thought inhabited sub-Saharan Africa. They are described on one informative website as being among the animals which cause the most panic in a bedroom'.

They are taking over our lives. To keep them at bay we have taken to turning the bedside light off the second we retire.

Horror of horrors - the life cycle of this insect varies from six weeks to an alarming six years. I'm going to have to get the Hoover out more often, and invest in blackout curtains.