"Dogs have owners, but cats have staff": so goes the saying quoted on a million cat-lovers' coffee mugs, anyway. Bob, a large and determined marmalade moggy, seems to have appointed James Bowen his butler, chauffeur and nurse at first sight, despite his chosen human's unpromising CV; Bowen had spent 10 years on the street as a heroin addict, was on a last-chance methadone program and had just been allowed to move into a flat in sheltered housing. He made a bare living by busking, belting out Nirvana songs in London's Covent Garden tourist precinct. As meal tickets go, James Bowen was a poor prospect.
Nevertheless, when Bob climbed through his window it was clear he intended to stay. He had an abscess on his leg, probably the result of a fight; Bowen had £33 in his pocket, which immediately went on veterinary antibiotics. It was busking money, so he figured he could always make more. It didn't mean he wanted a cat.
So he asked around the neighbourhood, trying to find Bob's legitimate owner; having established that he didn't have one, he decided he must be a street cat who should be living wild. "I tried to send him on his way," Bowen says. "But every day he'd follow me a little bit more. I'd get home from busking and there he would be on my doorstep so he would stay the night. And then one day he actually followed me on to the bus."
Bob, who now has his own bus pass, had decided to become his busking companion. While Bowen played guitar for pennies, he sat on his shoulders, unfazed by the crowds or the snapping cameras that would soon turn him into an internet star. "It was at that point I felt 'well I am going to have to start taking responsibility for this little creature if he's going to be following me around'. It's not like you can really tell a cat what to do. They do what they want to do."
What Bowen had to do, in turn, was take responsibility for himself so that he could take care of Bob. Ultimately, that meant going through the torment of withdrawal from methadone to become drug-free. The cat, he said later, gave him "the determination to knuckle down and get over it. Using drugs is a selfish thing; Bob gave me something else to focus on."
Since their first encounter, Bob has become the focus not only of Bowen's recovery but of a series of best-selling books and, most recently, a feature film adaptation. Back in 2011, a literary agent who had been walking past Bowen's busking pitch encouraged Bowen to tell his story with the help of a ghost-writer called Gary Jenkins; A Street Cat Named Bob became a best-seller.
Bowen first dabbled with heroin in Melbourne. His mother moved back and forth between Australia and Britain twice; he lived in Western Australia from the time he was three. They moved often, returning to Britain when he was 11 and back to Australia three years later. Meanwhile, young James was diagnosed with several mental illnesses, dropped out of school at 15 and headed to Melbourne.
"My godparents lived in Hawthorn so that was good. But then at 18 I came back to England and everything fell apart. I was a long-haired goth with piercings and all that, because that's what it was all about in the late '90s in Melbourne – and there was a terrible heroin problem in Melbourne at that time too, wasn't there? Then I went on the streets in London and ended up being an addict."
Bowen has now moved out of the flat where he was first given a roof and bought his own house in outer London. Almost inevitably, there has been a tabloid backlash against his Dick Whittington story of recovery – one story accusing him of collecting benefits even as his book topped the best-seller lists, another in which his mother in Australia declared that he had rejected her – but he regards them with the stoicism of someone who has seen much worse. "That was a ridiculous story, so it didn't matter really," he says of the housing fraud accusation. "What I did, in fact, was put the paper in the cat litter tray." As usual, Bob got to have the last word.
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.