The World According to Bob: The Further Adventures of One Man and His Street-wise Cat

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It had been one of those days, the type where anything that could go wrong had gone wrong.

It had begun when my alarm had failed to go off and I’d overslept which meant that my cat, Bob, and I were already running late when we set off to catch the bus near my flat in Tottenham, north London on our way to Islington, where I sold the homeless magazine The Big Issue. We were barely five minutes into our journey when things went from bad to worse.

Bob was sitting in his usual position, half-asleep on the seat next to me when he suddenly lifted his head, looking around suspiciously. In the two years since I’d met him, Bob’s ability to sniff trouble had been pretty near infallible. Within moments the bus was filled with an acrid, burning smell and the panicked driver was announcing that our journey was being ‘terminated’ and we all had to get off. ‘Immediately.’

It wasn’t quite the evacuation of the Titanic, but the bus was three quarters full so there was a lot of chaotic pushing and jostling. Bob didn’t seem in a rush so we left them to it and were among the last to get off, which, as it turned out, was a wise decision. The bus may have smelled awful, but at least it was warm.

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