Z/Yen is a fluid place (no, we're not talking about Michael Mainelli's ginger beer intake) but this spring/summer sees an especially large number of new faces.

Five.

We're calling them The Famous Five, in honour of the quirky books and the "lashings of ginger beer" that we traditionally get through in the summer months at Z/Yen.

Two of our newbies are top notch placement postgrads from Royal Holloway, University of London, Bikash Kharel and Shevangee Gupta. They bring freshly-minted mutually distributed ledger and predictive analytics advanced skills to Z/Yen's burgeoning teams in those areas.

Alexandra Karathodorou joins the core Z/Yen team to bring her strong project management skills to our events, web presence and general frenetic Z/Yen activities. She has got off to a flying start.

Luke Owens has just joined us for the summer from Georgia State University - Z/Yen has a long and successful record of taking placement students from that institution.

Last but not least is Hector Leitch, son of Matthew Leitch, the latter of whom has been doing a great deal of associate work with us this year and with whom we have worked, on and off, for more years than any of us care to remember. This will be Hector's second summer internship with Z/Yen - which tells you that he is very good indeed.

Lovers of Enid Blyton's Famous Five books might recall that the five comprised two boys, two girls and a dog. Now and Z/Yen has no intention of assigning specific Famous Five characters to individual Z/Yen folk, but...

...Unfortunately for Hector...

...Readers (and writers) of a certain age who, for example, remember The Famous Five, will probably also remember Hector's House, a rather whimsical puppet show about a dog and his house/garden.

But if it makes all of Z/Yen's new Famous Five feel any better, Z/Yen people were, at one time, all allocated cartoon characters.

Ian Harris is Wile E. Coyote and Michael Mainelli is the Tasmanian Devil.