THE good news is that the re-homing of the three feral kittens abandoned on our doorstep some four months ago has been an outstanding success.

They have gone to a loving couple who feed them well and let them take the warmest spot in the house just in front of the log-burner. The bad news is that it is our log-burner, and it is my wife who sleeps two foot distant from me on the other side of a Chinese puzzle pile of kittens.

I can't really complain about them because around 33 per cent of them are normal. Honey is just a regular six-month-old kitten: she plays, sleeps a lot and fills endless litter trays - so far, so good.

As for the other two, they are pretty much the sublime and the ridiculous, and I'm not quite sure which one is the sublime, or they may both just be ridiculous. We have Lilly, she looks quite normal, being mostly a short-haired Siamese and really quite a good looking blue-eyed kitten, except that there is apparently a typo in her name - the first letter should have been an S'. She is daft to the power of 10. If you open a cupboard she is in it, the same goes for the dishwasher and the fridge. I thought that closing the door of the fridge after she had gone in and leaving her there for a bit would teach her a lesson. Oh no, there is no teaching Silly, you open the door and there she is, happy as can be in the sub-zero temperatures with a big grin on her face and showing no signs of wanting to decamp. She is chasing the cursor on the screen as I try to type this and thinks that all pens belong on the floor and makes it her mission to get them out of drawers, pots and briefcases so that they can be re-united with mother earth.

That leaves us with Izzy (the one that I used to know as Blind Lemon Pie), who we thought was blind because she has a kind of milky film over her eyes. She looked like a runt and we didn't hold out much hope for her survival. But survive she has, and with some reasonable measure of eyesight. But, despite eating quite healthily she is steadily not getting any bigger as her siblings grow in leaps and bounds. This has led us to believe that she may well be a dwarf, or a miniature, or an elf, or whatever you call a tiny cat. She is about a third of the size of the others and her cloudy blue eyes give her a permanently sad expression.

This has accorded her the role of number one princess cat. She is placed on a cushion in front of the fire, and then moved to another cushion on the sofa if she gets too hot, carried to the utility room for feeding because she only has little legs. And of course, she gets carried up to bed at night because the stairs are too high for her, where she is reunited with her favourite knitted mouse that she can pretend she caught herself.

Did I really study all of those years, and then build up my own business, so that I could become nothing more than a night time porter service and concierge for a dwarf cat? Apparently so.