The World According to Bob

well-established routine for a long time now. Even though money was tight, I always tried to feed him decent ‘Scientific Formula’ food from the most popular cat food brands. I’d ration it carefully, following the recommended portions. So in the morning he had a flat tea cup full of high-nutrition biscuits and at the end of the day, about an hour before his bed time, he’d then have a further half a tea cup of biscuits along with half a pouch of meat as his evening meal.
    These two meals would be supplemented by the little snacks he had while we were out working. It was always more than sufficient to keep him happy and healthy. In fact, he normally left a quarter or so of his morning biscuits because it was too much for him. Sometimes he’d leave it there, at other times he’d eat it just before we headed out to work, as a mid-morning snack.
    A few days after he’d got his head caught in the tin can, however, I noticed that he was wolfing down all his breakfast in double-quick time. He was even licking the bowl clean.
    He was also more demanding. I had always decided when to give him a reward for his tricks. But now he began to ask for snacks himself. There was something different about the way he pleaded for these snacks as well. It wasn’t the usual plaintive, ’Puss in Boots’ look. It was as if he was really desperate for food. And it was the same when we got home. Ordinarily, he was pretty laid back about getting his dinner, but he began to hassle me as soon as we were in the door. He would be quite agitated until I filled his bowl up. Again, he’d shovel everything down him as fast as possible and give me a look straight out of Oliver Twist . ‘Please, dad, can I have some more?’
    The alarming thing, however, was that after a week or so of this behaviour he wasn’t gaining any weight.
    That’s odd , I said to myself one evening when he’d finished his dinner and still looked like he could have eaten more.
    Adding to my suspicions that something was wrong was the fact that he was going to the toilet more often. Bob was, like most cats, a creature of habit when it came to toilet time. Over the years he’d overcome his dislike of going in the litter tray at home and did his business there in the mornings. He’d then go again when we were out in London. Suddenly, however, this habit had changed and he had started going three times or more each day. He might have been going more than that, as far as I knew. I’d caught him using the toilet in the flat once. I hadn’t seen him use it again since then, for some reason. Maybe he didn’t like me watching him? But as I began to worry more and more about this change in his habits I noticed the water in the toilet bowl was a little off colour sometimes.
    He had also started demanding to be taken to the toilet more often at Angel. It was always a real palaver, packing up and heading over to the Green so that he could get on with things, but it had to be done.
    ‘What is wrong with you, Bob?’ I said, losing patience with him after a few days of this. He just gave me an aloof look, as if to tell me to mind my own business.
    The moment I knew I had a real problem, however, was when I found him dragging his bottom along the floor. The first time I noticed it was one morning soon after I’d woken up. I saw him deep in concentration, scooting his undercarriage on the carpet in the living room.
    I wasn’t best pleased.
    ‘Bob, that’s disgusting, what do you think you’re doing?’ I scalded him.
    But I soon realised that it must mean that he had a problem. As usual, I was short of money and didn’t want to splash out on a visit to the vet and the inevitable medicine expenses that would follow. So the next morning on the way into work I decided to drop into the local library and have a little root around on the internet. I had my suspicions but had to be sure. My hunch was that he had some kind of stomach infection involving a parasite. It didn’t necessarily explain the eating, but it was consistent with going to the toilet more often and scooting his bottom on the floor.
    My greatest fear was that it was a parasite infection. I cast my mind back to my childhood in Australia when I’d seen a couple of cats develop worms. It wasn’t pleasant, and was also contagious. A lot of children in Australia used to contract worms from their cats. It was quite gross actually.
    Of course, researching illness on the internet is always the biggest mistake you