Tales Of The Country: Meet the latest members of the family

Roger, a friend from university who is now a reinsurance tycoon living in Chicago, has e-mailed me to say that he has been following my despatches from the country, via the internet, with growing incredulity. Roger remembers me as someone enthusiastic about animals only when they were accompanied by baked beans. So our expanding menagerie makes him wonder whether I have been possessed by the ghost of James Herriot, the celebrated vet, author and pseudonym who, as I reported a couple of weeks ago, spent some time during the Second World War convalescing in a military hospital near here.

If only. It would be nice to have a bit more expertise in the fraught business of cleaning out the hooves of our miniature Shetland pony, Zoe. Not to mention the prospect of acting as midwife when Zoe gives birth towards the end of this month, when the rest of the family will be sunning themselves in Sardinia and I will be home alone.

Well, not exactly alone. Just over a week ago we had seven animals, which seemed more than enough, and now we have 12, our cat Tess having ejected five kittens. Tess will not be a year old until June, so her pregnancy came as a shock. The rascal who took advantage of her youthful naivety we assume to be a black-and-white tom who knocks around these parts looking mean. He hasn't so much as even sent flowers since the birth, damn him. But at least Tess, despite being very much a teenage mum, is showing all the right maternal instincts. She seems to know that her nights on the tiles, at least for now, are a thing of the past.

The birth was an extraordinary business. Those who knew more about the feline world than we did, which pretty much amounted to anyone who had ever seen an episode of Top Cat, told us that Tess would find somewhere secluded to have her kittens, and then slink off to give birth with the minimum of fuss.

Sure enough, we realised last Wednesday that we hadn't seen Tess for a few hours, and then she came padding into the kitchen, no longer pregnant. Eventually we found her tiny progeny under the bed in an attic bedroom. The valance was stained with blood and will probably need treating with not so much non-biological as nuclear Persil, but otherwise she had cleaned up after herself scrupulously. We'd been told that a first litter, at such a young age, would be unlikely to comprise more than three kittens. So naturally there were five. Nothing round here seems to happen in small measures. Zoe the pony will probably confound veterinary science and produce octuplets.

Still, even I, by no means yet a cat lover, can see that the kittens are adorable. I have been reading the letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West and, coincidentally, there is one in which Vita tells Virginia that her cat has just had five kittens. "Such a warm, soft, young heap," she writes, and that describes the scene nicely.

Needless to add, they won't stay a warm, soft, young heap. The children, who have received them rapturously, are desperate to keep at least three, but I have put my foot down – nowhere near the kittens, of course – and said that we will be keeping only one. So now the squabbling has begun over what to call the one we keep. Eleanor favours Tiger Lily. Joseph likes Tip. Jacob, the youngest, has not yet contributed to the debate, which is just as well, as he is currently very fond of the word "snot".

Whoever prevails, the others can be mollified by the certainty that there will be more births before the year is out, starting with a miniature Shetland foal. But as I'll probably be the only one here when he or she arrives, I'm threatening to exercise my right to choose a name. There's every chance that the family will return from Sardinia to find Wayne Rooney living in the paddock.

There's a ghost of a chance weÿre haunted

Our gardener, Mark, last week confided in my wife Jane that he thinks our house, or at any rate our garden, is haunted. He says he was cutting the grass on the bottom lawn when he thought he heard animated voices, coming from the main lawn. But when he looked, there was nobody there.

Adding fuel or perhaps white spirit to his fiery conviction is the presence in our acre or so of woodland of a headstone, dated 1883. It marks the grave of a dog, and clearly records that the age at which the creature died was 14 years and three months. Except that Mark doesn't think it is a dog's grave at all, but that of a human being, who likes to waft in from the other side for the odd game of ghostly croquet. He is not convinced by my assertion that the Victorians would not have buried a person in unconsecrated ground, but nor is he worried by these spectral visits. "Doesn't bother me," he says, although I'll know otherwise if next week I see him clutching a crucifix with his secateurs.

Loud and proud: our champion town crier

You wait all your life to attend a town-crying competition, without even necessarily knowing it, and then one takes place all of six miles away, and you're in London for the weekend. Still, Bromyard's town crier, Peter Dauncey, kindly filled me in on the details of the seventh annual Bromyard Town Crier Championships. The competition had three categories – dignity, diction and inflection, and sustained volume and clarity – and was held over two days for the handsome Bromyard Cup. It was won by Jason Bell, the town crier of Cromer in Norfolk. Hip, hip, oyez!