Grasshopper

Running is dull. Let me tell you about the grasshopper instead:

About this time last year I was on my way to work, standing on a busy tube. Due to it being rush hour there where no empty seats so I opted to stand by the door instead. With my headphones in, I began to daydream about what I’ll do when I win the lottery. It was then that I noticed a man on the opposite side of the train staring at me. Despite my best efforts, I am not a morning person; I crawl out of bed 10 minutes before I’m due to leave and am forever late. This is what I generally look like in the morning:

Nope. There was no chance this man was checking me out and if he was then I should probably be a little scared that he would be attracted to some one who looks like this:

The only logical explanation was that I had something on my face. A quick check in the back of my ipod revealed that my face was clear – well as clear as it gets anyway. Suddenly he was crossing the carriage towards me. On closer inspection he was quite good looking, I offered a smile in his direction. Letters to Cleo were helpfully screaming in my ears ‘I want you to want meeeee’ which caused me to miss what he had said. Yanking out the headphones, I smiled sweetly and asked him to repeat what I could only presume was a declaration of his undying love for me, how he’d been building up the courage to talk to me for months, how he was secretly a prince and wanted to save me from the daily commute of doom and whisk me away on a magic carpet to a land where I could battle dragons and ride horses that speak and live in a big castle where everyone sings in tune. Sadly his reply was not what I had expected. ‘Excuse me, you have a grasshopper on your head’.

My mind failed to respond to his words and instead I replied ‘Oh, right, thanks’ and brushed my fingers through my hair as if I was just smoothing down a loose hair. Then it dawned on me what he had just said. A grasshopper. On my head.

Now it may come as a surprise to some but I am no grasshopper expert however I do not believe mid March is not grasshopper season, surely they should be living it up in meadows in the summer, was this grasshopper taking a holiday? On my head! Why would any one want to take a holiday on the London underground? It’s slow and crowded and you spend most of the journey stuck in someone’s armpit or using your handbag as a shield and elbows as a sword. Perhaps this isn’t a problem for grasshoppers. I do not know. What I did know was there was a grasshopper on my head!

I’m not normally the type to freak out at bugs, I like to think I give an impression of unfazed logic when it comes to problems of this type. If a friend is scared of a spider I can calmly pick it up and remove it from the premises – saying that, if you saw me on my own with the spider, I’d be running around the furniture and begging it not to kill me.

Unfortunately on this occasion I did not project any impression of cool. A weird high pitch squeal escaped from the pit of my stomach, I did an involuntary shudder and frantically ran my fingers through my hair. It was an adult version of a three year old throwing themselves to the floor and screaming for someone to ‘get it out, get it out’. I desperately looked to the hot man (who I was convinced by this point definitely did not want to marry me) for help but my squeal must have scared him as he had retreated back to the other side of the carriage and continued to stare at me with a look of sheer horror.

My extreme reaction had caught the attention of all the other passengers in the carriage as well, let's bear in mind it was rush hour. And I still had a grasshopper on my head!

Unbeknown to me, by brushing my fingers through my hair, I had managed to decapitate the poor hopper and now had various grasshopper body parts mangled in amongst my hair. I continued to frantically brush my hair with my fingers and watched as his head fell to the floor, followed by various legs and finally the body. I had to stand next to that corpse for the rest of the journey, his bodiless head staring up at me.

I spend the rest of the day, repeatedly stroking my hair, convinced another leg was sticking out somewhere.

The strange thing is, a few months later I got on the underground and found another grasshopper sitting on my arm - I flicked him away, body intact this time. Perhaps there is a grasshopper conspiracy out there? Is the government trying to control us with hoppers? Maybe these are teenage hoppers who are playing a deadly game of chicken? I just dont know, what I do know is they're after me!

Oh the running – I did 11.3 miles on Tuesday, ate jelly babies instead of running on Friday and then nearly killed my self with 14 on Saturday. According to my co-worker running expert, this will be the longest run I do, otherwise my body won’t have enough time to adjust. I'm going to try for 16 on Monday night any way. Fingers crossed. Who knew running was so complicated!