It is a very well established fact that Clod, feline prince of my heart, is ridiculously adorable. He is a squishy grey blob of brain-melting cuteness and fluff.
He does have a naughty streak, and his favourite hobby is walking along one of our shelves and knocking every single item off individually, but he’s generally a congenial chap. Sometimes he purrs so hard that he drools, he rubs his face on things so happily that he leaves trails of spit, and he’s more than once headbutted me so hard in greeting that I’ve winced.
However, he is also on the Royal Mail’s blacklist of dangerous animals.
This is because he is deathly, singularly obsessed with post.
We have no idea why. He doesn’t react this way to anything else. He is pretty chill about most things. Post, though? He cannot fucking deal. It works him right up into a terrifying feral frenzy, and god forbid anyone in the vicinity when the postman cometh.
Before we got Clod, we just had a slot letterbox of the kind that’s more common in Europe (y’know, this sort of thing, but in a less fancy door, because we live in Cardiff and have hardly any connections to royalty at all):
This was all fine and dandy, until one day Clod noticed that, when the postman was putting the post through the door, it could be turned into an absolutely fabulous game of life and death called ‘Mauling the Mailman’. Clod used to sit by the kitchen window and watch for the postman, and as soon as the letters poked through the door, Clod would run over and grab the postman’s hand, attacking it with a crazed fervour hitherto unseen outside of a One Direction concert (may they rest in peace). It wasn’t playing at all; it was genuine attack mode. I’ve seen less vicious attacks on Black Friday news reports. It was horrendous.
We tried keeping him away from the door, which meant shutting him in the kitchen, but the post doesn’t come at a set time and we weren’t always at home (and obviously didn’t want to shut him up in one room all day, because no) so we weren’t always successful, which meant that Clod probably managed to wreak havoc about 5 or 6 times before we even really knew there was a problem. The postman, bless his little bearded face, tried a host of things to stop it. He tried poking the letters through with a stick. He tried pushing them through super slowly so that Clod didn’t hear it from the kitchen. He tried prayer (probably). None of it worked, and it came to a head one day when we heard a knock at the door and saw the poor dude standing on our porch, cradling his bleeding hand, and mum had to give him first aid. The blood stayed on our porch for weeks. Not because we’re lazy, you understand. We really gave it a good scrub. There was just a lot of it. How those people on Medical Detectives manage to clean up whole bodies’ worth, I do not know.
After that, we installed a mailbag inside the door so that the post could go into that and the postman’s hand wouldn’t be exposed to Clod’s wrath. It didn’t work, because Clod – who is usually an absolute idiot, and has been known to run into walls – figured out how to open the mailbag and maul the postman again. This also introduced an additional problem in that whenever someone tried to open the mailbag to get the post, Clod would attack them too. And to reiterate, by ‘attack’, I don’t mean that cute half-assed bite that cats do when they hold onto your hand and gently gnaw you. I mean he yowled, kicked, scratched and bit, often drawing blood. So, obviously, this solution did not work quite as well as we’d hoped.
Around this time, we got a message from the Royal Mail, informing us that – totally understandably – they would have to stop delivering our mail if we didn’t get our cat the fuck under control. So we did the only thing we could do, and installed an external mailbox. It is a pain in every single one of my limbs, and it was expensive and it looks ugly, but at least the postman isn’t at an elevated risk of tetanus any more.
Clod still watches at the window for the postman, seeking vengeance, but our porch is now blood-free.
For now.
I’m laughing so hard there are tears. I fucking love cats.
I forgot to mention that our regular postman applied for a change of route and was accepted, and so now we have an entirely new postman who has no idea of the wrath of Clod. I pray to god that he never does.
I will pray for the poor sod who is yet to meet Clod
I’m so upset that this post has so many notes because I feel like it misrepresents my beautiful boy, and so I feel honour bound to defend his character
– one time Clod climbed on my boyfriend’s shoulders and breathed really heavily in his ear
– whenever we eat dinner, Clod sits on a shelf above the table and tries to put his paw in our food
– he sleeps on my old blanket in the kitchen
– he smells dusty, musty and a bit like toast
– sometimes he sits in the bread basket and pretends to be a wholewheat loaf
– he was born to a rescue cat who had been abandoned by a house of irresponsible students
– he is an amateur philosopher and has devised his own theory, named Cloddic Thought, in which it is supposed that the root motive of all actions is cat treats
– if you throw a treat, he can often catch it in his paws
– he once tried to be an economist but gave up when he realised he had no concept of money
– the white spot on his chest is his tie pin
– he is a CINNAMON ROLL and please Clod, I’ve told them all now, can I go home to my family, oh god please I have told them the truth
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Star Wars, to quote the guy who emailed me, does bring people from diverse cultures and backgrounds together. And everybody of those cultures and backgrounds deserve to be seen on the screen and on the page and in comic book panels. This isn’t a joke. This isn’t glib. This is their lives. Not everybody is you. And as I said before, if you can imagine a Star Wars where Luke Skywalker hates gay people, I got bad news for you, hoss: you watched a different Star Wars than I did. You fell to the Dark Side. You joined the Empire. And I hope one day that Big Gay Luke Skywalker shows up at your battlestation door and he shines his rainbow gaysaber at you and you can do nothing but melt beneath its warm rays of inclusiveness and kindness and you come to realize that love is good and gay people exist and dang, were you a huge asshole.
T thing/ explain to me why Norwegian has two written languages.
psssh why you need t thing WHEN YOU HAVE ME??
Long ago the three Scandinavian countries lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the black plague attacked!
Norway was hit especially hard, the plague killed one third of the entire population. And who did the plague completely wipe out? Educated people. Because educated people, pastors, doctors, etc. are usually in a job where they help the sick or bury the dead. And what happens when you’re constantly around a bunch of sick people? You get sick too!
So because Norway was suddenly so much weaker, both economically and martially, and even academically, they decided to join up with Denmark.
An this is where Norway ceased to be a country. The great strong and fearsome viking kings were all but forgotten. Centuries of unions under either Sweden or Denmark had robbed Norway of land they had once conquered, like Greenland, Iceland, the Faeroe Islands, Skaania. All we had left was a thin strip of coast, Svalbard and Jan Mayen.
But then, 400 years later, the age of National Romance happened. Suddenly being nationalistic was a good thing. And the Norwegian people remembered who they once were. Norway was the poorest country in Europe. All the universities were in Denmark. All education was in Danish. If you were someone, you spoke Danish, not that barbaric noise called “Norwegian”. There is no Norwegian nobility, only Danish.
Suddenly France is on fire.
The Americans are declaring independence
Such beauty. Such impress. Such national pride to the people and for the people!
Then Napoleon came along and pulled all of Europe into war.
Denmark joined on Napoleon’s side
Sweden, who has never gotten along with Denmark, backed England up
When England won, Sweden, as one of the winners, wanted Norway
And in the one brief week, between Denmark relinquishing its hold and Sweden taking over, the Norwegians saw their chance and took it.
A couple politicians stuck their heads together and wrote a constitution in only a handful of days. This constitution was heavily influenced by the French one written during the revolution, as well as the American Declaration of Independence. The constitution declared Norway as an independent country, and ever since that day, May 17th, 1814, 17th of May has been known as the Norwegian Constitution day, our national holiday.
Unfortunately, however, the Swedes were not persuaded by a silly little piece of paper and took over anyway, but hey. We tried.
Luckily they were much more lax than the Danes and let Norway basically rule themselves, as long as they followed the law of the Swedish king.
The Norwegians never forgot their brief moment of supposed victory though, and only a generation or two later they staged one of the most peaceful freedom wars in known history and Sweden went “well fuck you, you can have that damn country of yours! Just leave us alone”
sixty years later we found oil and became the richest country in the world but that has nothing to do with the language
ANYWAY, so Sweden left Norway basically to its own devices, and the Norwegians decided they no longer wanted Danish to be the main language. They wanted Norwegian. Problem is, at that time, after 400 years of rule, there was no such thing as anything specifically Norwegian. So they had a dilemma.
One guy, Knud Knudsen, took the structure of the Danish language and mixed it with what he heard the people speak around him. He called it Bokmål
This other guy, this slightly more nationalistic guy, Ivar Aasen (we like him), travelled around the country and found the most isolated farms and villages. The places that had not been touched and influenced by the Danish rule over the past 400 years. These were the thickest and most unique dialects and accents. He mixed them all together and created Nynorsk.
Bokmål means Book-language and Nynorsk means New-Norwegian
Fun fact: They actually held a vote deciding what to name these two languages and Nynorsk & Bokmål won over Dansk-Norsk (Danish-Norwegian) & Norsk (Norwegian) by ONE SINGLE VOTE.
So here they had a problem
‘Cause you see Nynorsk was something that was REALLY Norwegian. Something the nationalists had been pining after for decades, centuries. And it was easy to learn for those whose lives hadn’t been ruled by Danish language for as long as they could remember.
But Bokmål was a mix of two languages, and you know what happens when you mix two languages: It is greatly simplified. This made it easy to learn and it was something “norwegian enough to pass”. It was much easier to go from Danish to Bokmål for those who lived in the cities and had written Danish all their lives.
And while Nynorsk was the one that embodied the goal of this whole language hunt, and the one most loved by the peasants, Bokmål as the “easy way out” for the people in the cities, for the educated politicians and journalists and doctors and pastors who spoke Danish, even though they identified as Norwegian
And this is where they came to a standstill
People who liked Nynorsk used it and refused to give it up for Bokmål
People who liked Bokmål used it and refused to give it up for Nynorsk
and.. well that brings us to today
Though over the years the two languages have slowly been drifting towards each other, becoming more and more alike, Bokmål has also been taking over because it is what is most commonly used in the media. Because the media originates in the cities after all.
Both T thing and I are partial to Nynorsk though we use Bokmål more often in daily life, simply because it is more practical.
And that is why Norwegian is actually two languages.
