James Bowen - A Street Cat Named Bob

He also had a wild side to his personality. He was calmer than when he’d first arrived, thanks largely to the fact that he’d been neutered. But he could still be a complete maniac around the flat and would frequently tear around the place, playing with anything that he could lay his paws on. One day I watched him amuse himself for the best part of an hour with a bottle top, flipping it around the floor of the living room with his paws. Another time he found a bumblebee. It was obviously injured – it had one wing damaged – so it was struggling around on the coffee table in the living room. The bee was rolling around and every now and again it would fall off the table on to the carpet. Every time this happened, Bob would very gently pick it up with his teeth and put it back on the table. It was really impressive the way he could delicately pick the bee up by the wing and place it safely on the flat surface. He’d then watch it while it struggled around again. It was a really comical sight. He didn’t want to eat it. He just wanted to play with it.

The street instinct was still apparent when it came to food as well. When I took him downstairs to do his toilet now, he made a beeline for the area at the back of the flats where the dustbins were kept. The large ‘wheelie bins’ were often left open and occasionally there were discarded black, plastic refuse sacks, that had been ripped open by urban foxes or stray dogs. Bob would always go and investigate them to see if there were any leftovers. On one occasion I’d caught him dragging a chicken drumstick that had somehow been overlooked by the other scavengers. Old habits die hard, I figured.

It was true, of course. Despite the fact I was feeding him on a regular basis, he still treated every meal as if it was going to be his last. At home in the flat, the moment I scooped some cat food into his bowl he would stick his face in it and start guzzling as if there was no tomorrow.

‘Slow down and enjoy your food, Bob,’ I’d tell him, but to no avail. Again, I figured he’d spent so long having to make the most of every eating opportunity that he hadn’t adapted to living in a place where he was guaranteed a square meal twice a day. I knew how that felt. I’d spent large chunks of my life living the same way. I couldn’t really blame him.

Bob and I had so much in common. Maybe that was why the bond had formed so fast – and was growing so deep.

The most irritating thing – literally – about him, however, was the fact that his fur had begun coating every corner of the flat.

It was perfectly natural, of course. Spring was here and he was getting rid of his winter coat. But he was starting to lose a hell of a lot of fur. To help the moulting process he was rubbing himself on anything and everything he could find in the flat. As a result he was covering it in a thick film of fur. It was a real pain.

It was a good sign that his coat – and the rest of his body – was returning to good health. He was still a bit scrawny, but there was no sign of his ribs as there had been when I’d first met him. His coat was naturally thin because of the environment he’d probably grown up in – the street. The medication had helped with his bald patches and the antibiotics had definitely done the trick in healing his old wound. That had almost disappeared now, in fact, if you didn’t know it was there you would never have noticed it.

All in all he looked in a lot better nick than he had done a month or so earlier.

I didn’t bathe him. Cats wash themselves, and he was a typical cat in that respect, regularly licking and washing himself. In fact, Bob was one of the most meticulous cats I’d ever seen. I’d watch him go through the ritual, methodically licking his paws. It fascinated me, especially the fact that it was linked so strongly to his ancient ancestors.

Bob’s distant relatives originated from hot climates and didn’t sweat, so licking themselves was their way of releasing saliva and cooling themselves down. It was also their version of the invisibility cloak.

Smell is bad for cats from a hunting point of view. Cats are stealth hunters and ambush their prey, so they have to be as unobtrusive as possible. Cat saliva contains a natural deodorant which is why they lick themselves a lot. It’s been proven by zoologists that cats that lick the smell off themselves survive longer and have more successful offspring. It’s also their way of hiding themselves from predators like large snakes, lizards and other larger carnivorous mammals.

Of course, the most important reason that Bob and his ancestors had always licked themselves was to establish and maintain good health. Cats effectively self-medicate. Licking cuts down the number of parasites, such as lice, mites and ticks that can potentially damage the cat. It also stops infection in any open wounds, as cats’ saliva also contains an antiseptic agent. As I watched him one day, it occurred to me that this might be why Bob was licking himself so regularly. He knew his body had been in a bad way. This was his way of helping the healing process.

The other funny habit he’d developed was watching television. I first noticed that he watched things on screens one day when I was playing around on a computer in the local library. I often popped in there on the way to Covent Garden or when I wasn’t busking. I’d taken Bob along for a walk. He had decided to sit on my lap and was staring at the screen with me. I noticed that as I was moving the mouse around he was trying to swat the cursor with his paw. So back at the flat, as an experiment one day, I’d just put the TV on and left the room to go and do something in the bedroom. I came back to find Bob ensconced on the sofa, watching.

I’d heard about cats watching TV from a friend whose cat loved Star Trek: The Next Generation . Whenever it heard that familiar music – Dah-Dah Dah Dah Dah-Dah Dah Dah – he’d come running into the room and jump on the sofa. I saw it happen a few times and it was hilarious. No joke.

Pretty soon, Bob had become a bit of a telly addict as well. If something caught his eye, then he suddenly was glued to the screen. I found it really funny watching him watching Channel Four racing. He really liked the horses. It wasn’t something I watched but I got a real kick from watching him sitting there fascinated by it.

One Thursday morning, a few weeks after we had started our busking partnership in Covent Garden, I got up earlier than usual, made us both some breakfast and headed out of the door with Bob. Rather than heading for central London as usual, we got off the bus near Islington Green.

I’d made a decision. With him accompanying me almost every day on the streets now, I needed to do the responsible thing and get Bob microchipped.

Microchipping cats and dogs used to be a complicated business but now it’s simple. All it requires is a simple surgical procedure in which a vet injects a tiny chip into the cat’s neck. The chip contains a serial number, which is then logged against their owner’s details. That way if a stray cat is found people can scan the chip and find out where it belongs.

Given the life Bob and I led, I figured it was a good idea to get it done. If, God forbid, we ever got separated, we’d be able to find each other. If worse came to worst and something happened to me, at least the records would show that Bob wasn’t a completely feral street cat; he had once been in a loving home.

When I’d first begun researching the microchipping process in the library I had quickly come to the conclusion that I couldn’t afford it. Most vets were charging an extortionate sixty to eighty pounds to insert a chip. I just didn’t have that kind of money and, even if I did, I wouldn’t have paid that much on principle.