One man and his cat on the road to recovery

A STREET CAT NAMED BOB BY JAMES BOWEN (Hodder £14.99)



Busking: Bob the cat

Recovering drug addict James Bowen’s life was at a low ebb in the spring of 2007. On methadone as part of a programme to wean him off heroin, he was barely scraping an existence busking in London’s Covent Garden, when he returned to his sheltered accommodation in Tottenham one evening to find a ginger tom on the doorstep.

The thin mangy moggy seemed as lonely and hopeless as James, who took pity on the animal and began feeding him. After a local search failed to yield an owner, James took the stray in, an arrangement that filled as much a need in him as in the cat, whom he christened Bob.

After a childhood made difficult by his parents’ divorce and much moving around, including emigration from England to Australia, James had come to London where he played in a rock band and then drifted into a life of drug dependency fuelled by petty crime. What Bob offered James was the opportunity to care for another creature, a responsibility he had never known.

With his limited resources, James slowly and lovingly nursed Bob back to health. He dug into his meagre income to feed Bob and they settled into a companionable existence whose only inconvenience was Bob’s refusal to use a litter tray and insistence on being walked down the five flights of stairs from the flat to go out to the loo.

A COUPLE OF CAT FACTS...



...There are 8.6 million pets cats in the UK



...The average lifetime cost of owning a cat is £17,200 (Sainsbury’s pet insurance fig.)



James’s routine was to put Bob out for the day before setting off on the bus into town to sing and play his guitar for tourists in Covent Garden.

But then Bob started following him and it became increasingly difficult to shoo him away, especially as there were dangerous roads to be crossed. One day there was nothing for it but to put Bob on a makeshift lead and take him along. Bob travelled sitting on James’s shoulders.

The trouble was, so many cat-mad passers-by stopped him to stroke the animal that James arrived late at his pitch, secretly cursing Bob for thereby costing him some of his usual £25-a-day takings. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Within minutes, people who would normally have walked by without giving James a second glance were lingering to make a fuss of the cat sitting sedately in his guitar case, and most made a donation. By the end of the day, he’d racked up more than £60.

It was the beginning of a phenomenon as tourists and commuters befriended Bob and James, many bringing titbits for the cat. People were amazed at how placidly Bob would sit all day, quite happily watching the world go by while James earned a living. Not that it was always without a hitch; on a couple of occasions Bob bolted when startled, leading to a frantic chase through the crowded streets.

Bob’s popularity continued when James switched from busking to selling the Big Issue, the magazine produced and sold by homeless people. This change in direction was part of James’s growing sense of a need to get his life in order, which he puts down to the responsibility of looking after Bob, and the example the cat offered of the possibility of a second chance.