Mash-up @ The Oubliette

The Oubliette are now rather appropriately based in a dungeon-like building in Southwark. I was shocked to hear it's been empty since 1969. I'm told there's a dispute between the family who own it, and the council who compulsorily purchased some of the land it's on. The dispute, like the building, passes down through the generations.

The group have been there for seven weeks but, newly returned to London, I visited them for the first time last night. As I went to lock up my bike, I managed to rip the seat of my jeans wide open. I tried telling myself at least now I was dressed appropriately for a squat. It meant I spent most of the evening sitting down.

Dan has once again displayed his talent for transforming spaces and drawing people together for his projects. The cavernous warehouse has wooden floors and heavy steel beams and needed forty years of dusting. Yet the first floor where the performances took place could have been a Shoreditch lounge, with comfy sofas, a bar, a stage, and artful lighting. There were many artworks on the walls here, and on the second floor as well.

One person Dan has recently welcomed back into the fold is Mouse, who has evolved into a proper cycle courier, working for a decent firm and doing 17+ jobs a day. But he still gets in trouble. He'd phoned me last week from an unknown number. It was the first time I'd heard from him all year. He opened with "Do you know who this is? Yeah. You got to help me, man!"

He'd been thrown out of his squat by his temperamental Spanish girlfriend - she was on methadone, she'd called the police on him, she was a thief, she cheated on him... he said it all so quickly, I didn't try to process it, knowing there was little point trying to get to the bottom of such things. But I gave him practical advice: I told him where Dan was living, since he didn't know the address. Go there, Dan will help you. And so he did. I hope Mouse can avoid trouble for a while. But trouble loves him.

I spent much of the evening talking to a man I'd briefly lived with last summer. At that time he'd been taking a pupillage to become a barrister, arriving each day in a pinstripe suit. His girlfriend lived in Clapham and was also trainee lawyer. He'd been a grammar school boy and studied law at Cambridge.

But by night he was a squatter and urban explorer. He climbed cranes and half-built tower blocks; disused railway tunnels; a cathedral and an old power station. These climbing skills enabling him to help squat buildings inaccessible to anyone else. He studied housing law and soon no longer needed the Advisory Service for Squatters to help him defend his group against eviction. He won an adjournment against a government lawyer; and three or four adjournments against the owners of a Mayfair strip club.

Last night I didn't recognize him at first. He'd cropped his hair at the sides, but kept it long on top. He was wearing a checked shirt and jeans rather than the customary suit. "What happened?" I asked. "I got fired."

He's now been squatting a year without break. He's still happy with his barrister girlfriend, and hasn't left her for an Italian anarcho-punk. He has a tendency to question authority like the renegade in a Hollywood movie. But in a few years, when he's exhausted this adventure, he'll return to law or politics or anything else he wants. And he'll do very, very well.

The highlight of the night was Aaron Barschak's comedy routine. He's the Jesus lookalike who gatecrashed Prince William's birthday party dressed as Osama Bin Laden. He performed for us in Mayfair, so this was to be the third time I'd seen him perform.

Barschak is a nice guy, and clearly very intelligent, but he's an inconsistent comedian. One moment he'll have the audience in fits of laughter; and the next moment will lose them as he expounds various theories or tries to educate us without making us laugh too. And his more needlessly shocking material was never going to be well received by an audience made up at least in part of right-on squatters.

His routine about the Queen's gynaecologist was crude and received awkwardly by the audience. But moments later he hilariously developed it into an impression of "Mrs Bigot" explaining precisely what she expected Gordon Brown to do to her for 45 penitent minutes.

At the end of his overly long act, he said the worst insult he's been given is "You're more of a performance artist than a comedian". While he packed up his many props from around the stage, he said it was like moving your stuff out of your now-ex-girlfriend's flat. He said he didn't want to go, and was drawing it out to spend a little more time with us.

I think there's a real poignancy to his act: the rare moments of laughter in his hit-or-miss sets are so obviously what he lives for.

The Oubliette's programme of events continue through the weekend. Tonight there'll be a performance by glam-punk-rockers Bad Guys, and the fantastic improv group The Impressarios. Come if you can!