[Vision2020] Caturday (June 29, 2013)

Tom Hansen thansen at moscow.com
Sat Jun 29 08:33:59 PDT 2013


Courtesy of Mail Online (London, England) at:

http://tinyurl.com/pzwbagx

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How Bob became the Imelda Marcos of woolly scarves

Who KNOWS why certain books sell? Maybe they capture a mood, or a moment in time, or a need that we didn’t know we had. But a book that sells can change a writer’s life forever.

Last year, James Bowen’s debut book, A Street Cat Named Bob, drifted quietly into the shops and was instantly snapped up by thousands of eager readers. Bowen is in his 30s and had spent much of the previous decade homeless and in the grip of heroin addiction.

Then he met Bob, a streetwise ginger tom, who moved in with him and changed his life. Bowen, at this point, was newly clean of drugs and selling The Big Issue on the corner of Angel Underground station in trendy Islington.

Bob, who liked to perch on his shoulder like a fur-lined parrot, became part of his sales pitch, and the pair of them became something of a feature of North London life.

I saw them, my daughter saw them, tourists took pictures and the legend spread. It probably helped that while Bowen was scruffy and on his uppers, Bob was clearly well looked after and in the peak of physical condition. Man adored cat, and cat, in the way of all cats, accepted this love as his due.

A year later, then, comes the sequel, which recounts James and Bob’s more recent adventures. As before, Bob stares out of the cover with Jeeves-like sagacity, as though interrupted by the camera in a moment of deep contemplation, although he is probably thinking only about food.

He also has a scarf on, which sets him apart from other cats. People knit these scarves for him, on the wholly reasonable grounds that, having been given one, he would certainly appreciate a whole lot more. Bowen says that as Imelda Marcos was to shoes, so Bob is to  woolly mufflers.

Life on the streets, of course, can be eventful and highly stressful. As the book begins, Bowen has a flat in Tottenham, but his CV is not a thing of beauty, and he still has to sell The Big Issue to keep going.

Thus, he remains vulnerable to the vagaries of London weather, the whims of its policemen and, increasingly, the jealousy of other Big Issue vendors, who resent his high sales and cat-related popularity.

Gradually, though, in tiny increments, his life improves. It’s a clever way of telling the story. The cat draws you in, but this is really about a deeply troubled young man whose life had imploded and could easily have ended in the nastiest way possible.

One evening, he and Bob come home and there’s a junkie in the corridor, who overdoses and dies before their eyes. Bowen knows that it could have been him. He is convinced that his cat has saved his life, and who is to say he is wrong?

Other chapters, by contrast, are almost sublimely uneventful. It snows. Buses are cancelled. Bowen acquires a bike. Bob somehow gets on top of a cupboard. You would hardly believe that so much could be made out of so little.

What carries you through are the book’s amiability, candour and lack of sentimentality. Bowen has not been a nice man to know in the past, but he is working on it. This evenness of tone, I suspect, is primarily down to his co-writer, Garry Jenkins, once of this parish and now a highly proficient interpreter of other people’s life stories. He is writer as therapist, and knows that only honesty will do.

The World According To Bob could almost be old technology’s response to all those cute pictures of cats on the internet. It even has a happy ending, of sorts, as James and Bob’s story becomes known and their first book is commissioned, written and published.

Will their third book be about the writing of the second book? But only the hardest of hearts would begrudge them their success, which has only confirmed what all pet owners know by instinct and experience, that regular close proximity to animals does wonders for your mental health.
Close proximity to this book will do wonders for it, too.

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Cat-about-town: Bob, the ginger tom



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One man and his cat: Busker James Bowen with Bob


 
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Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)
http://www.MoscowCares.com
  
Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"There's room at the top they are telling you still 
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill 
If you want to be like the folks on the hill."

- John Lennon
 

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