I apologise in advance for the link I am posting. I have grown tired of people asking me if I think that Michael Jackson is guilty or not. I do not know, and I suspect that no one, except he and the children concerned, does. In fact, given his own precarious grip on reality, and the cross-examining and in depth interviewing of the children, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were beginning to have difficulties differentiating the truth from the speculation.

While the crimes he is accused of are quite clearly appalling, I am bored of the media’s moral parading of the trial. He is clearly a freakshow, and should be left alone instead of being held up for ridicule.

So instead of joining the chattering classes in their pointless discussion of the tawdry court rooms goings-on, take my advice and waste your time by playing this Escape from Neverland game instead.

Those familiar with my living arrangements over the last year will have followed me through the stresses and the worries of moving out of my rented one-bed flat to buy a house with my two childhood friends, Blonde and Busy. The three of us shared an idyllic childhood in Zimbabwe, brought up in similar fashion by parents who had grown up together and been brought up in similar fashion and so on… Our politics and moral values are similar, we have shared experience, and strong and wonderful friendships which stretch back over most of our lives.

Blonde and Busy are cousins, and prior to our buying, they lived together, renting rooms in a house. We were aware that there were lifestyle clashes which may affect us on moving in together – they are both vegetarians, I am a carnivore. They both stopped smoking, I didn’t. They had both been living in shared accommodation, I had become used to living with a partner, and then by myself. But we knew that our basic ethos was the same: and that while I am a carnivore, I do not buy processed meat, and while a smoker, I am happy to pop outside for a cigarette. And as large amounts of our time before moving in was spent together anyway, both as friends, and in the campaigning and fundraising work we did with Zimbabweans, we hoped the transition would be a smooth one.

Blonde and Busy will agree when I say that the nine months which followed our completion date saw some of the most challenging times of our lives together. Without apportioning blame, basic differences in how we individually felt our house should operate led to irresolvable clashes, which inevitably escalated when our differing temperaments would meet to address possible solutions. And without talking of any actual examples, I think it is fair to say that in our own very individual ways, each of us at various times displayed an intransigence bordering on the pugnacious in our inability to reach concurrence on various issues, which had we had the ability to access some perspective, would have doubtless been revealed to us as trivialities.

Towards the end of the last year, we were all ready to move out. The experiment had failed, our friendships were becoming irreparable. When I found out that our kitchen was to house a steady supply of seed trays growing wheat grass for juicing, I lost all semblance of having a sense of humour about the situation, and found myself forced into a position where I was considering the advice of one of my friends to cook veal in the kitchen and leave a bloody mess on the work tops, just to re-assert my right to my own space.

The end of this story is anti-climatic. I don’t know how or why, but Blonde, Busy and Recidivist have sorted out their differences. We have got to a stage where we sit down and eat dinner together. Where we are going for a facial together before my birthday party on Saturday. Where we advise each other on our lives, and more importantly, seek and value each other’s advice. I remember now why we were friends as children, and we laugh over the same irrelevancies as we did then, when our lives were uncomplicated.

While I was languishing with my throat infection last week, Blonde called me from the kitchen one morning, saying that she had made me a wheatgrass shot, and that as I was ill, I would really benefit from it. But the measure of how well our differences have mended is not that she thought of it, but the fact that I not only accepted, I was actually quite touched that she had thought of it, and secretly harboured suspicions that she may be right! But please don’t tell anyone…

I am no stranger to spending my time in a trance-like state buying things online. My last purchase, ‘la Mer – the lip-balm’ from American eBay (which came in at under half-price, including delivery, in comparison to retail prices here) should be arriving at work today. However, I am still off sick, and in a break from our pursuit of chocolate nirvana, the three of us currently at home (waving a stir-crazy ‘hi’ to our housemate, Busy), have found a new boredom-combating activity to keep us occupied. One of my favourite sites on which to while away the hours is Cityscope, which the stand-in lurve partner, Grumpy, and I have dubbed ‘real estate porn’. As we are destined due to some very basic biological incompatibities never to consummate our relationship, and are therefore in need of some other frisson to create the illusion of a healthy lurve partnership, we often spend Saturday afternoons after going to the market, browsing through it, planning our future lottery win disbursement. (If you visit it, please make sure you have a look at the £7 million property in Covent Garden. Grumpy likes the space for five cars, with a turntable for choosing which one you are going to drive today. I like the fact that the wine cellar is bigger than the staff bedroom. )

Last night as I was trawling the web in idle contemplation, I found a link to a new site, Nethouseprices.com which has accessed the land registry so that you can see the sale value of houses sold anywhere in the UK in the past 5 years. Various articles written about it in online supplements in the last couple of days make the observation that this is likely to feed the ‘net-curtain-twitching’ tendencies of our ‘keep up with the Joneses’ society. One journalist even went so far as to look up all his neighbouring properties, and then phone up their owners to ask them how they felt about him knowing how much they had paid.

I am not sure that there is an issue here. Obviously the benefits of the site are that if you are looking at buying a property, you can check out the area beforehand, make sure that the prices have recently been rising and not falling, and that the asking price is in line with recent sales in the neighbourhood. A very good resource, as anyone who has ever bought a house, and wondered how on earth they are going to deconstruct the ‘up-and-coming area’ style lies being fed to them by unscrupulous local estate agents, will attest to.

Of course there is always the fun side of the site. The ‘hmmm… I really fancy that guy I met last night. He’s funny, intelligent, attractive, single, seemed to like me, and said that he’s looking to settle down and have children in the next two years or so. We have a mutual interest in bridge/extreme ironing/the UKIP (delete as…) and share a love of expensive chocolate. I think I have met my soulmate, my lobster. Now, all that’s left is to ensure that he has a fucking expensive house, and can afford to finance my online retail habit.’ Or the “My boss keeps saying ‘we’re a small, family-run business, we can’t afford to give you the pay rise you are asking for, you’re breaking my balls here!’, I’m going to see how just how much she spent on that six-bed-house-with-200-foot-garden she bought in Loughton this year”.

And to be honest, is there really a problem with that? Is it malicious and snoopy? Or is it ethically justifiable to want to know how much your mate spent on his new Victorian terrace in Stoke Newington, while saying that he can’t afford to go on holiday with you? To check on the bankability of potential future joint account holders? Well, if I am honest, it probably doesn’t sit very well with my ethical outlook, but that doesn’t stop the fact that it is fun to find out people’s financial secrets.

Of course the first thing we did was to enter our postcode, and find out that a property five doors away sold for just over £90k more in August last year, than we bought ours for six months before in February. So this afternoon found us wandering nonchalantly down the road, having decided just to see which one it was. This little excursion culminated in Blonde saying ‘I’ll keep look-out – you look through the letter box to see if they have also got wooden floors!’. Unfortunately they had those brushy things on the inside of their letter box, and I couldn’t even see whether they had used Farrow and Ball shades on the hallway walls. Killjoys! Anyhow. Since then, we have had one valuation and have two more booked.

I had better go. I have a date tonight. The friend I am meeting doesn’t realise that it is a date – he thinks we are meeting for a convivial glass of wine. But I’ve just seen what three-doors-down from him sold for last year, and I think I had better try and brush out this dreadlock before I meet him.