A Street Cat Named Bob

This was one of the biggest changes that I’d noticed since I’d started working on the streets a decade earlier. The streets were very much more competitive than they used to be. The ‘chuggers’ were mostly hyper-enthusiastic young people working for charities. Their job was to collar well-heeled commuters and tourists and get them to listen to a spiel about their charity. They would then try to persuade them to sign up for direct debits to be taken from their bank accounts. It was like being mugged by a charity - hence their nickname: chuggers.

Some were third world charities others were health related, to do with cancer or other illnesses like cystic fibrosis and Alzheimer’s. I didn’t have a problem with them being there but it was the way they hassled people that annoyed me. I had my own sales spiel for the Big Issue, of course. But I wasn’t as intrusive or as nagging as some of these. They would follow people down the road engaging them in conversations they didn’t want to have.

As a result of this, I would see people emerge from the tube station, see a wall of these enthusiastic canvassers, usually in their loud coloured T-shirts, and make a run for it. A lot of them were potential Big Issue buyers so it was very annoying.

If someone was really driving people away I would have a word. Some of the canvassers were fine about it. They respected me and gave me my space. But others didn’t.

One day I got into a heated argument with a young student with a mop of Marc Bolan-like curls. He’d been really irritating people by bouncing around and walking alongside them as they tried to get away. I decided to have a word.

‘Hey, mate, you’re making life difficult for the rest of us who are working here,’ I said, trying to be civil about it. ‘Can you just move along the road a few yards and give us some space?’

He’d got really antsy about it. ‘I’ve got every right to be here,’ he said. ‘You can’t tell me what to do and I will do what I want.’

If you want to get someone’s back up, you just need to say something like that. So I put him straight on the fact that while he was trying to make pocket money to fund his ‘gap year’, I was trying to make money to pay for my electricity and gas and to keep a roof over my and Bob’s head.

His face kind of sank when I put it in those terms.

The other people who were a real irritant for me were the people who sold the assorted free magazines that were being published now. Some of them - like StyleList and ShortList– were actually good-quality magazines, so they caused me no end of problems, the simplest of which boiled down to a question: why were people going to pay for my magazine when they could get a free one from these people?

So whenever one strayed into my area I’d try to explain it to them. I’d say to them straight up: ‘We all need to work, so you need to give me some space to do my job, you need to be at least twenty feet away.’ It didn’t always work, however, often because a lot of the vendors who sold these magazines didn’t speak English. I would try to explain the situation to them but they didn’t understand what I was trying to say to them. Others simply didn’t want to listen to my complaints.

By far the most annoying people to work the streets around me, however, were the bucket rattlers: the charity workers who would turn up with large plastic buckets collecting for the latest cause.

Again, I sympathised with a lot of the things for which they were trying to raise money: Africa, environmental issues, animal rights. They were all great, worthwhile charities. But if the stories I had heard about how much of the money disappeared into the pockets of some of these bucket shakers were true, I didn’t have much sympathy. A lot of them didn’t have licences or any kind of meaningful accreditation. If you looked at the laminated badges around their necks, they could have been something from a kid’s birthday party. They looked amateurish.

Yet, despite this, they were allowed inside the tube stations, a place that was an absolute no-go zone for a Big Issue seller. It would really nark me when I saw a bucket rattler inside the concourse hassling people. Sometimes they would be standing right up against the turnstiles. By the time they emerged out of the station the commuters and visitors were usually in no mood to be persuaded to buy the Big Issue.

It was, I suppose, a bit of a reversal of roles. In Covent Garden I had been the maverick who hadn’t stuck to the designated areas and bent the laws a bit. Now I was on the receiving end of that.