Our neighbours, who apparently learned all about how to be squatters from a 1970s book entitled "How To Squat", moved out last Monday. Following the book's guidance to the last, they threw guitars and kaftans into the back of a VW Microbus and then piled in on top of them and drove off into the distance (well, towards Kentish Town.) People came in and put up half-hearted signs all over the house indicating to everyone it was under the control of some sort of spurious management company and squatting was absolutely forbidden, then they boarded up one window and pissed off. On Wednesday there was a knock on the door and when I answered it in my dressing gown (I was lounging round the house with tonsilitis feeling sorry for myself) there was a smiling kaftan-clad Pole on my doorstep asking for her bike back, which she'd apparently left in our back yard. F was very middle-class about it all, muttering about how wrong it all was as the VW Microbus was unloaded and its contents and occupants unceremoniously returned to the house next door.

We are trying to buy ourselves at the moment, and this is no easy feat. On Tuesday I visited every estate agent between Archway and Kentish Town. Some were quite helpful and said they had a couple of properties we might be interested in, and more coming in all the time; one actually sniggered at me when I told him our budget and said "round here? You'll be lucky." And a third tried to hook us up with a bloke called Giovani, who apparently provides "independent mortgage advice" from what seems to be a terraced house in High Barnet. We told the estate agent we had secured a mortgage in principle from our bank who offered a graduate mortgage, but he seemed to think this was rubbish, "nah, you don't wanna be doing that. See what they do is they offer you a mortgage in principle, yeah, but the thing is when you actually put down an offer, yeah, they claim they don't do mortgages for that property. If you buy a property in a block of more than six floors, yeah, most mortgage lenders won't give you a mortgage." This may well be true, though we don't especially want to live in a block of more than six floors anyway, but even if it is true, I'm not entirely sure I trust him. "What you need..." he opened up his drawer to reveal a stack of business cards "is a mortgage broker, yeah, and he'll go out and get you the best deal in less than 24 hours. Now this bloke Gio, I know him really well, really good bloke, totally independent mortgage broker, give him a call and he'll sort you out."

Independent my ass.

Anyway, the sum total of my dreams at the moment is a one-bedroom ex-council flat in Archway. We're looking at two this weekend, having turned down a third on the Maiden Lane Estate. For a mere £174,000 it looked a bargain, but, of course, there's a reason it's so cheap, namely the Maiden Lane Estate. We've heard tales of local pubs barring all inhabitants of the estate, and according to a friend you can't live there unless you own an illegal pitbull. Rumours abound of marauding gangs and a local pub becoming a no-go area when a naive landlord lifted the ban. I asked my boss about this, and apparently it's true, though I suspect he has a vested interest in the whole thing, not particularly wanting me to move practically onto his doorstep.

The Lives of Others

Having succumbed to the temptations of Facebook it's been a while since I wrote anything here, partly because all 5 or so of my blog readers have also abandoned blogging for Facebook, and partly because I've been too busy accumulating "friends" to take the time to do anything more constructive.

I now have almost 50 friends and have joined such bastions of deep discussion as the David Tennant Appreciation Society, though I avoided joining a group called "You know you've been a student too long when..." which included the inexplicably popular topic "Where's the most embarrassing place you've been sick?" to which 7 pages worth of respondents had enthusiastically listed taxis, lecture theatres, shops, partners' beds, 11th-floor windows etc.

But there is life outside Facebook, and this week it's called "The Lives of Others" (or "Das Leben der Anderen", if you want to look clever). I saw this film at The Renoir in Bloomsbury, because for an exrta £1 you get a much more comfortable seat than at the Camden Odeon and your feet don't stick to the carpet (partly because they don't sell anything at the Renoir that you can spill on the carpet to make it sticky in the first place) and on top of this you get a warm, fuzzy glow that you're actually doing something intellectual, which the Camden Odeon distinctly lacks.

The Lives of Others is a German film so I felt happily posey dragging the reluctant F along to read the subtitles. It's also a brilliant film. It focuses on a playwright in the German Democratic Republic (irony of this name noted) in the 1980s, and the Stasi officer tasked with monitoring him. The settings are suitably bleak without seeming to form the backdrop for a lecture entitled "Why Communism Doesn't Work" (which is often the case), and the characters are interesting in that, with the exception of one of the government minister, none is especially horrible, but none is a saint, either, and many are capable of fatal mistakes. I can't say very much else as it would spoil it for you, but do look out for the anachronism at the end, where a book is purchased in Euros in 1993...