A Street Cat Named Bob

All I had to do now was raise £500. Easy.

The flight I’d found was heading to Australia in the first week of December. So for the next few weeks, I worked every hour of the day in all weather. Bob came with me most days, although I left him at home when it was raining heavily. I knew he didn’t like it and I didn’t want to risk him catching a chill or getting ill before I went away. There was no way I’d be able to go to Australia knowing he was ill again.

I was soon saving up a bit of cash, which I kept in a little tea caddy I’d found. Slowly but surely it began to fill up. As my departure date loomed into view, I had enough to make the trip.

I headed to Heathrow with a heavy heart. I’d said goodbye to Bob at Belle’s flat. He’d not looked too concerned, but then he had no idea I was going to be away for the best part of six weeks. I knew he’d be safe with Belle but it still didn’t stop me fretting. I really had become a paranoid parent.

If I’d imagined the trip to Australia was going to be a nice, relaxing adventure I was sorely mistaken. The thirty-six hours or so it took me was an absolute nightmare.

It started quietly enough. The Air China flight to Beijing took eleven hours and was uneventful. I watched the in-flight movie and had a meal but I found it hard to sleep because I wasn’t feeling fantastic. It was partly because of my medication but partly also because of the damp London weather. Maybe I’d spent too many hours selling the Big Issue in the pouring rain. I had a horrendous cold and kept sneezing all the way through the flight. I got a few funny looks from the air stewardesses and some of my fellow passengers when I had a bad attack, but thought nothing of it until we landed in Beijing.

As we taxied towards the terminal, there was an announcement from the captain over the tannoy. It was in Chinese first but there was then an English translation. It basically said that we should stay in our seats until we were asked to leave the plane.

‘Odd,’ I thought.

The next thing I saw was two uniformed Chinese officials wearing facemasks. They were walking down the aisle - straight towards me. When they got to me, one of them produced a thermometer.

An air stewardess was standing there to translate. ‘These men are from the Chinese government. They need to take your temperature,’ she said.

‘OK,’ I said, sensing this wasn’t the time to argue.

I opened wide and sat there while one of the officials kept looking at his watch. After they’d muttered something in Chinese the air hostess said: ‘You need to go with these men to undergo some routine medical checks.’

It was 2008 and we were at the height of the swine flu scare. China, in particular, was being incredibly nervous about it. I’d watched a report on the news a few days earlier in which they’d talked about the way people were being turned away from China if there was the slightest hint of them being infected. A lot of people were being placed in quarantine and held there for days.

So I was a bit apprehensive as I walked off with them. I had visions of me being holed up in some Chinese isolation ward for a month.

They ran all sorts of tests on me, from blood tests to swabs. They probably found all sorts of interesting things - but they found no trace of swine flu, SARS or anything else contagious. After a couple of hours, a mildly apologetic official told me that I was free to go.

The only problem was that I now had to make my way back to my connecting flight and I was lost inside the humongous, hangar-like space that is Beijing airport.

I had about three hours to find my luggage and my connecting flight. It had been years since I’d spent any time in an airport terminal. I’d forgotten how big and soulless they were, and this one was especially so. I had to take a train from one part of Terminal 3 to another part.

After a few wrong turns I found my connecting flight less than an hour before it was due to take off.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I sank into my seat on the plane and slept like a log on the flight to Melbourne, mainly through exhaustion. But then at Melbourne I hit another snag.

As I made my way through the customs area I was suddenly aware of a Labrador dog sniffing animatedly at my luggage.

‘Excuse me, sir, would you mind coming this way with us,’ a customs guard said.

‘Oh God,’ I thought. ‘I’m never going to get to meet my mother.’

I was taken to an inspection room where they started going through my stuff. They then ran an electric drug detector over my bag. I could tell there was a problem from the expressions on their faces.

‘I’m afraid your luggage has tested positive for cocaine,’ the guard said.

I was gobsmacked. I had no idea how that was possible. I didn’t take cocaine and didn’t really know anyone who did. None of my friends could afford it.

As it turned out, they said that it wasn’t illegal for me to have traces of it for private use.