We All Need to Be Ourselves

I had taken Bob into the park off the Embankment, near where we had been busking around Charing Cross station. I decided to sit down and take a break, while he did his business in the bushes.

He was attached to a long, string lead, which I could lengthen. After a while I felt a tugging on the line, as if I was a fisherman who had landed a fish. He was trying to get deeper into the bush. I stood up and fed him some more string. I assumed he wanted to find the right spot.

It was a couple of minutes later when he emerged. He did so with a small mouse in his teeth. It was alive and wriggling, desperately trying to escape. I was about to intervene, when the mouse managed to escape. Bob had placed it on the ground for a second and it had made a run for it. It scampered off at lightning speed.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Cats are predatory creatures. If we were going to be out in the world together, incidents like this were going to happen. It brought something home to me.

None of us are angels. We are all imperfect creatures. But we are who we are. It is in our nature. So many people try to change others – to mould them into something they are not. I wasn’t going to do that.

Bob is a strong personality and I wanted him to be himself. Looking back on it, I think it was another of the reasons he stayed with me. None of us want to be prisoners of other people’s ideas about who we should be. We all need to be free to be ourselves.