I would really, really like to hear the story of why Clod doesn't like the mailman.
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.
