We once took a photo of the whole Tribe together on the bed - it was in the days when They Were Nine, and gone are Mollie, Zool, Shrimp and Drumknott, and Esk and Ptep have moved to Norwich.

I doubt we'll ever get the current Tribe to sit together, but they were all in the study together yesterday, waiting for us to turn off the rain, so here's a photo montage of them all.

One of his special voices is that he makes when he catches a slow worm; we have a colony (if that's the word) of these curious legless lizards living in the compost heap.

Iggy loves to remove them from their home, and bat them round the garden, but thankfully as he makes this particular noise when he does it, Pete can hurtle outside and restore the unfortunate creature to its proper home, albeit probably just on a temporary basis.

Iggy's slow worm song is a proper sign of Spring :)

Iggy is the most partial to a snort (and he does snort it!), and will make mournful rowling noises until his habit is fed. However, we didn't realise just how bad his addiction is.

Last night, while we were watching the television, he started playing up - wandering behind the television, and other places in the living room, and chewing cables. Now, he was a cable chewer when he was a kitten, but I haven't seen him do it for literally years. Clearly he was in a temper, and so was I when I saw him sink his teeth into my Macbook mains lead, so he got a slap.

Eventually, it dawned on me what was the matter, so I rummaged about in the newly organised kitchen drawers, and found a sort of catnip teabag style thing, with some ancient and stale catnip dust in it. I scattered it on the floor, and he fell upon it with cries of relief and ecstasy.

We did try to acquire new supplies on Saturday, but our local pet stores didn't have anything, so I looked on eBay, and bought 200g for £9. Now 200g may not sound a lot to you, but it is a huge amount of catnip - came in a bag about 10"x8", stuffed to the gills. And thankfully it arrived this morning - quantities of the demon drug were scattered round the study, Iggy snorted then had to go and sleep it off, and Lilith and Liessa both attempted to eat the cardboard that had surrounded the package.

I had no idea that a cat could get addicted to catnip, but clearly Iggy has ...

Clearly, he'd been in either the fish pond or the stream, as he had muddy bits, and smelled frankly rather unpleasant. He's not one to be dried with a towel, either, and so remained rather spiky and fragrant until he dried off naturally.

He was closely followed by Mustrum who was in an identical state, so we assume they'd had one of their periodic full and frank exchanges of views, and chased each other through the stream. Mussy likes to be towelled, so we dealt with him a little more easily.

Both of the miscreants slept all day - Mustrum on the shelf by Pete's desk, and Iggy under my dressing gown on the bed. I'm pleased to report that they are now both dry and seem none the worse for their adventure.

It's just as well, really, that Iggy has reserves of gruntle almost as extensive as those he has of gravitas.

Iggy came home with yet another scratch on his nose the other day; it looked painful, but healed up fine, and the scar will join the others on his battle-scarred face.

and Lilith had a very nasty hole under her front leg; her Greatest Fan brought her home to show us (I really must write about this young girl one day), and said she thought a dog had got her.

but actually, looking at the wound, and knowing Lily's entirely deserved reputation as the Great white Cream Hunter, we think that she finally took on a rat that got the better of her. We've watched her carefully for a week to make sure it wasn't abscessing, and was healing cleanly, and she's just about mended now.

the interesting thing is that - like so many other incidents with cats - it seems to have made her slightly less stand-offish; but I'm probably imagining that ...

we have no explanation for this, except we wonder are they perhaps mimicing the Northern Ireland peace agreement? In which case - a scary thought, I know - which of them is Paisley, and which one Adams?

if they are in the same room, there is often hissing and grumbling, and they have had some fights which have actually frightened us - two alpha male Bengals in one house is clearly not a good idea. It seems to vary which one of them is in charge at any given moment, probably just so the Blobs are confused (our natural state).

this lunchtime, I'd put some waffer thin turkey in bowls (this is one of their favourite things, and usually brings forth a herd of maurauding elephants cats within a trice). Iggy was scoffing out of one bowl, and Mussie arrived; not a problem, as I had a second bowl prepared. But just for a moment, they shared a bowl, which was a bit nervewracking.

wind on an hour or so, and Mustrum is in what we call the "nest" - a furry rug on some shelves in the study, next to the comms stack and above a monitor (and thus warm and snuggly). Iggy arrived, and very carefully insinuated himself on to the shelf, quite clearly pretending that Mustrum simply *wasn't there*. Mustrum opened his blue eyes, looked a bit baffled, watched cautiously and let him get on with it.

they're now both asleep, and while I wouldn't say they were curled up together, bits of them are touching.

it's all very odd indeed.

Pete went down to the electrickery cupboard, and reset the circuit breaker. It tripped again. So investigations began.

it transpired that some cat* had pissed on the TFT monitor in the server room. This caused the monitor to die, with a nasty burning small. This in its turn upset the KVM (a gadget that allows several base units to run with just one keyboard and monitor between them). One of the UPS in there appears to have a completely shagged battery, and that, coupled with the dead monitor and shagged keyboard, meant we couldn't shut the linux server down before the UPS gave out. The monster UPS in the study simply gave up the ghost and switched itself off.

it took an hour or more to sort all this out, and then we went to the tip with the offending monitor, because of all the things I don't want in the house, a cat-wee-infested monitor is not one of them ...

it was quite sad, in a way; that was a 15" monitor, one of a pair we bought in 1998 for something like £650 *each*.

* my money is on Iggy, for various reasons. He rowled to go out about 5 minutes before this happened, and then rowled to come straight back in again, because it was cold. So I suspect he took himself upstairs and relieved himself. I'm very fond of that cat, but sometimes I forget why ...