Hey there, it's me, Carla from Network Rail, with some important news if you're getting

a trainer for Christmas and New Year.

Most of the Rail Network will remain open, however, some train services will be affected as we make improvements to the railway from

Sunday the 24th of December to Tuesday the 2nd of January.

So go on, check before you travel at National Rail.co. UK.

forward slash Christmas. Thanks. Welcome to another mini podcast from Away with Words. I'm Martha Barnett. It's a warm day in

autumn. You're out for a stroll in the country and if the air is still and the sun is at just

the right angle you may see the glint of spider threads floating lazily in the air.

Particularly at this time of year, some spiders use an odd means of traveling.

They shoot out threads of their own silk and then hitch a ride on the breeze.

Entomologists call this technique ballooning.

Walt Whitman described it in a poem writing of a noiseless patient spider launching forth

filament, filament, filament out of itself.

And the word for these silky threads, gossamer.

It's a beautiful word gossamer.

It almost sounds like itself, doesn't it?

And this term's meaning has come to extend to anything flimsy, insubstantial, or gauzy.

Cole Porter sang of a trip to the moon on gossamer wings and Charlotte Brante wrote of a gossamer

happiness hanging in the air.

So how did Spider silk ever get the name gossamer? Well it seems the spider's filaments take their

name from an old word for late autumn. In this country that period is often

called Indian summer. In Britain the same period was long known as St Martin's summer.

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