A Street Cat Named Bob

A couple of people had filmed him too, some with their phones, others with proper video cameras. I started casting my mind back over those that had shot footage of him in recent months. Who could have shot a film that was now on YouTube? There were a couple of obvious candidates, but I made a note to check it out at the first opportunity.

The following morning I headed down to the local library with Bob and booked myself online.

I punched in the search terms: Bob Big Issue Cat. Sure enough, there was a link to YouTube, which I clicked on. To my surprise there was not one, but two films there.

‘Hey Bob, look, he was right. You are a star on YouTube.’

He hadn’t been terribly interested until that point. It wasn’t Channel Four racing, after all. But when I clicked on the first video and saw and heard myself talking he jumped on to the keyboard and popped his face right up against the screen.

As I watched the first film, which was called ‘Bobcat and I’, the memory came back to me. I’d been approached by a film student. He’d followed me around for a while back during the days when we were selling the Big Issue around Neal Street. There was nice footage of us there and of us getting on the bus and walking the streets. Watching the film it gave a pretty good summary of the day-to-day life of a Big Issue seller. There were clips of people fussing over Bob, but also a sequence where I was confronted by some guys who didn’t believe he was a ‘tame’ cat. They belonged to the same group of people who thought I was drugging him.

The other video had been filmed more recently around the Angel by a Russian guy. I clicked on the link for that and saw that he’d called his film ‘Bob The Big Issue Cat’. This must have been the one that the Spanish students had seen. I could see that it had had tens of thousands of hits. I was gobsmacked.

The feeling that Bob was becoming some kind of celebrity had been building for a while. Every now and again someone would say: ‘Ah, is that Bob? I’ve heard about him.’ Or ‘Is this the famous Bobcat?’ I’d always assumed it was through word of mouth. Then, a few weeks before meeting the Spanish teenagers, we had featured in a local newspaper, the Islington Tribune. I’d even been approached by an American lady, an agent, who asked me whether I’d thought about writing a book about me and Bob. As if!

The Spanish teenagers made me realise that it had begun to morph into something much more than local celebrity. Bob was becoming a feline star.

As I headed towards the bus stop and absorbed what I had just discovered, I couldn’t help smiling. On one of the films I had said that Bob had saved my life. When I first heard it I thought it sounded a bit crass, a bit of an exaggeration too. But as I walked along the road and put it all into perspective it began to sink in: it was true, he really had.

In the two years since I’d found him sitting in that half-lit hallway, he had transformed my world. Back then I’d been a recovering heroin addict living a hand-to-mouth existence. I was in my late twenties and yet I had no real direction or purpose in life beyond survival. I’d lost contact with my family and barely had a friend in the world. Not to put too fine a point on it, my life was a total mess. All that had changed.

My trip to Australia hadn’t made up for the difficulties of the past, but it had brought me and my mother back together again. The wounds were being healed. I had the feeling we were going to become close again. My battle with drugs was finally drawing to a close, or at least, I hoped it was. The amount of Subutex I had to take was diminishing steadily. The day when I wouldn’t have to take it all was looming into view on the horizon. I could finally see an end to my addiction. There had been times when I’d never imagined that was possible.

Most of all, I’d finally laid down some roots. It might not have seemed much to most people, but my little flat in Tottenham had given me the kind of security and stability that I’d always secretly craved. I’d never lived for so long in the same place: I’d been there more than four years and would remain there even longer. There was no doubt in my mind that would not have happened if it hadn’t been for Bob.

I was raised as a churchgoer but I wasn’t a practising Christian. I wasn’t an agnostic or atheist either. My view is that we should all take a bit from every religion and philosophy. I’m not a Buddhist but I like Buddhist philosophies, in particular. They give you a very good structure that you can build your life around. For instance, I definitely believe in karma, the idea that what goes around, comes around. I wondered whether Bob was my reward for having done something good, somewhere in my troubled life.