Half of OOT already knows your name and exactly where you live, so good luck with staying un-trainwrecked.

Don't you want to keep a lot of things you do secret? Like where to get the best bin food or where your next squat will be?

I love the line learning Omaha Poker. Yeah just calling up Jimmy's ledger would be enough to get the newbies scurrying in another direction.......

Yes indeed. Believe me, I have no interest in being on reality TV. I don't see how it would help my life in any way, but there are lots of ways it would harm it.

We get a couple of media requests a day at the moment. Yesterday we were asked by BBC London radio if we they could interview us for a programme on "skipping" for food in central London but we declined. Lots of homeless people depend on food left outside sandwich stores, so it would be a really bad thing if we attracted too much attention to where it can be found.

We just got this email:

"Dear temporary school,

I came to visit 39A Clarges Mews on Saturday 10 Jan 09 and really love what you are doing. Before I came I was worried that the listed building will be damaged by squatting but I was completely charmed by what I saw. You seemed to be taking very good care of the house and were very appreciative of its heritage. I've been to squat parties myself which were usually dirty, messy and druggy but I like them because I am very fascinated by how people appropriate space for creative use. Your 'squat' is more like an art school and I feel very at home there.

When I was looking at the historic room with the flower and bird wallpaper, I got talking to the guy who was locking up the rooms, maybe his name was [...]? I told him that I am an architect and I have worked on a project over the past 2 years restoring a 1720s Georgian House in Mayfair, a similar period to Clarges Mews although I think earlier. The house is [....], which is now the shop and private memebers club of the luxury menswear label [...], but was a modest farm house back in the 1720s and was the home of the late second Duke of Westminster. I said that I would be happy to help with my architectural knowledge on historic conservation.

At university, I've done some studies on how people appropriate space for their own uses different to what they were designed for, such as skateboarders using the urban landscape for skating, children playing with floor surface in train station. So what you are doing to these historic houses completely blow my mind away. I would like to get involved with your projects, please contact me if there is anything I can help. By the way, have you been documenting what you are doing? It would be a very interesting study for me, for example, on the appropriation of architectural space. And I think you are making art/ architectural history!"

or maybe it would be humiliating to be on tv talking about eating out of rubbish bins.

Ooooh a nice couple from NBC just came round wanting to film us.

We said no, sadly, since group policy is not to talk to the press.

Yeah, probably would be. But remember the food is wrapped in plastic, and is actually in binbags outside the store, not in a bin. So it's not really unhygienic since the food is fresh, sealed, and - due to the weather - refrigerated.

i see the distinction. you eat food left out on the street in bin bags.

you should screw over these people and talk to the press if you can think of something interesting to say and talk about. there is the slight chance it might lead to something that will help your writing career in some way. squatting is just a passing fad to divert your attention from poker, so you don't have anything of value to lose.

maybe line up a bunch of interviews before talking to any one person. spill the beans on everyone and everything. make is sound like you were just a mole all along. tell them your dream is to be an investigative reporter or some **** like that. you are a writer after all.

dish the dirt on how it is because people are interested in how these people live. maybe even set the interview(s) up for a month in advance so you have more to talk about when you do spill your guts.

Not everyone wants to screw over their friends for money.

I don't think asking about an internship would hurt though if Jimm is interested in journalism. Don't trade interviews to get it though.

I keep hearing you say this, and I keep seeing articles and stuff about you. I don't get it. Do you only talk to some press, and not others?

they're not really friends or friends worth a whole lot. it's a conditional arrangement. i think they're worth upsetting if it'll help his writing career. he should go out of his way to really impress these newspapers.

The policy is that we don't talk to the press at all, or even let them in. For TV, this kills it dead. But the print journalists can still get their story.

With the Washington Post, they interviewed a guy who was behind this group's previous squats but is no longer involved in any way. (He has a wife and child and lives away). He didn't help us find this place, he doesn't live here, has only been round a couple of times and then briefly, and he had no input in Temporary School of Thought. I really like him but he's not part of the group any more.

With the Evening Standard and Sunday Times, the reporters cunningly just didn't tell us they were journalists, so got shown round and to talk to us that way.

We do talk to student papers, blogs and most art mags. Style mags we look at case-by-case.

Well, I'm not going to do that. I don't have nearly enough interest in other people. Besides, I do have *some* integrity.

Actually my housemates all read my blog now, and make sure I show them each one. Even the anarchist teenagers like it, I guess because I'm reflexive and self-critical.

My plan insofar as I have one is just to keep it going and hope to get more readers, and see if any writing offers come out of that.

Just lol. From what I´ve read, you still are some sort of outsider among outsiders. Most of your fellow squatters are much, much younger than you and certainly don´t share your views on politics or arts. They may think of themselves as some sort of "we" right now, but most of them will move on to some kind of regular career. For them it´s just some temporary fad, to you it´s a mirror of your whole degenerate existence. You´re not one of them (no matter how hard you try) and you never will be.

"Integrity"? Just LOL. The way you use it, it´s just another way of saying "no" to any kind of responsibility, "no" to your life (i.e. getting your hands dirty).

Funniest thing I have ever read I think. Have not read these forums for like 7 months and when I last visited a Jimm thread he was in the early stages of his courer job.

As I have proceeded through this thread my emotions, thoughts and feelings have ebbed and flowed in a massive way. Think I will finish it out before I comment any more. I just really did find the above line extremely amusing.

I think this is the most disturbing part. Jimm has mistaken a culture of people who are ultimately accepting of almost anyone as a sign of actual friendship. The ironic part is Jimm is very unaccepting, judgmental and critical of others and willing to kick others and ban others. Were this community to judge people by Jimm's own standards Jimm would not be around.

I am not so sure why is so concerned about upsetting the apple cart to be honest. He has mistaken people who just don't care at all with being people who care about him.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage...cle2158953.ece

So Jimm, how much did you make from selling your story to The Sun? Movin on up to $10/$20 PLO anytime soon?

Ahahhahaha no, they are wastemen!

The Evening Standard phoned the communal mobile at 11.30pm last night and asked if the Park Lane place was anything to do with us. No way.

But yes, that's the place I set up in November, only to leave a week or so later because of that awful South African inviting in dogs and hobos. The two Swedish stripping sisters have also now left.

There was a party there on Friday which, inevitably, got them noticed.

Here's what I wrote about it:

"On Friday night there was a party at the squat I'd opened up in November, only to leave when it was over-run by dogs and hobos. The party was intended to raise money for the South African I so disliked to bugger off home, but they accepted my offer of a porcelain toilet if they'd let everyone from our place in for free. We put the toilet in the back of a bike trailer made from a shopping trolley, and the drunkest person amongst us gleefully offered to ride it there, hurtling past the perhaps bemused policemen outside the Saudi embassy. Unless I have forgotten something, this was the first time I ever got into a party by paying with a toilet. I must try it when I'm next outside Boujis.

The party was as horrible as expected, with dogs outnumbering sound systems four to two and the "psy trance" music even more terrible than it was meant to be. A cab-load of bull-necked crop-haired pastel-shirted Essex wideboys arrived at the same time we did. Otherwise the crowd was made up of one or two hundred hippy-crusty-punks and Euro-squatters crowded into the narrow building, jostling up the stairs, squashed into rooms whilst being assailed by bare-chested bongo-playing men. The plaster was long ago stripped off the stairway walls and the carpets ripped up, so there was dust everywhere. The bathroom has two sinks and toilets but no bath or shower. ("Imagine what their toilet is going to be like twelve hours after the party" I said to someone from my place. He replied "Imagine what it was like twelve hours before!") For a kitchen they have a toaster, microwave and kettle on a table, but no sink or cooker. People have scribbled over the walls throughout and there are bare wires and broken floorboards and the roof leaks. I suppose this is what many squats are like. It's not an environment in which I feel comfortable but it must suit or be the only choice of some, since in recent weeks the place has filled up with people. I left after an hour, incorrectly fearing the party would get out of hand."

The article is entirely accurate, by the way, although the price of the properties is grossly inflated - one of them sold for £5.5 million last October - and they don't really convey how derelict the place is. Bare floors and walls, dust everywhere, no carpets, no kitchen, no baths or showers, etc.

I just hope the story doesn't reflect too badly on us.

Tomorrow we're hosting a talk on theories of public/private space by a visiting fellow in the architecture department at the London School of Economics. You wouldn't get that at the dog squat.

Yea, you wouldn't want people to think you were a homeless person who eats out of dumpsters or anything. Oh wait...

Congratulations on making the front page of The Sun, jimm.

What is amazing is that luckyjimm will turn this into $$$$$ and then lose it all playing cards, buying booze, and paying for hookers.

P.S. Do you still play cards?

Also, Sara Cox was talking about you on Radio 1...

Animals are crapping in our houses, and we're picking it up!

Did we lose a war? That's not the United Kingdom. That's not even Mexico.