In general, I tolerate people borrowing things from me if they handle it well, put it back where they found it, ask in advance if possible, and show some gratitude. I also find it completely natural to borrow some item if I need said item, if I'm pretty sure the owner will not be missing it while I'm borrowing it, and that I will be able to deliver back the item in the same condition as it was when I borrowed it.

I generally don't like things to stand unused. Things tend to deteriorate, and it's often better that someone lives in a house or a boat than that nobody cares for it. At the other hand, quite some of the squatters tend to not care about the property at all - and it doesn't need to be squatters even. Sometimes they believe they are doing a pretty good job "improving" the place, though the owner may disagree a lot. I do remember one guy living for free at a cottage (not squatting, there was an agreement), under the condition that he would take care of the cottage. He thought some insulation under the ceiling would be a good idea. I think he did some job insulating it - it looked quite horrible the way he had done it, but to his defense, he had done it in such a way that it could very easily be rigged down. He got thrown out immediately after sending pictures to the house owner asking if it was an acceptable solution ...

I rented out my old place far too cheaply to a lady that didn't care much. Part of my idea of renting the place out very cheap was that we could have someone we could trust to take care of our property and belongings. Unfortunately, she was the wrong person. "I've just gone home to Germany for Christmas, I turned off all the electricity". Thank you so much! Of course before I managed to come there (living 1600 km away) all the water installations were frozen. There was a dripping tap in the bathroom that hadn't gone frozen (since it was dripping), however the outlet tubes were frozen, the sink was filled up with ice, the water had been running out of the sink so there was a heap of ice on the floor even. "I told you I turned off the electricity, didn't I? Then it's your responsibility ...". Worst thing was that she was sort of living in a symbiosis with the local mice, who found plenty of food in the garbage that she never took out. The place got really stinky. She had thrown quite many of our possessions that didn't tolerate humidity, i.e. books, into some outdoor sheds. She would always call me and claim it was my responsibility to fix things if anything were wrong, even if the house rent she paid was really insignificant. In the end I found it was a better idea to sell the place to property developers and let them tear down the building. We had way too much stuff to get rid of up there, I was trying to sell and give away as much as possible, but eventually the time cost of putting out ads and communicating with people was too much compared to the money I got back from this activity. I did ask if there was anything she would like to keep. It was my intention to offer her a quite nice price on the items - I wrote and asked her how much she would be willing to pay. The reply? Since we were filthy rich and she was poor, she deserved to get them for free. Some of those things she wanted went to the thrash - normally I'm very happy to see things utilized rather than being thrown ... but I digress again.

Now we do have a garage that we don't use ... and we're having tenants currently storing lots of things outside the garage, and even carrying heavy bikes up and down the stairs from the basement. I feel pretty bad for that, I do think we should offer them to rent that garage for a cheap price eventually.

Two personal stories from the other side of the table ...

Once from my childhood, when we were in the scouts. The scouts had a cottage not so far from an abandoned power plant - so once we decided to do some sightseeing inside the plant. We spent some few minutes opening the lock on a window and climbed through the window. We were obviously not the first to enter the power plant - because there was lots of broken glass on the floor from people that obviously had just broken the window rather than carefully opening the lock. There were also a heap of new window glasses nearby, they were obviously replacing the window glass on a regular basis. Funny that those details are sticking to my memory, while I don't remember anything about the rest of the power plant! Also, when leaving, we spent five times as much time closing and locking the window than what we had spent opening it!

Juridically, this was of course a very wrong thing to do, we had no rights to enter the abandoned power plant. It could also be dangerous. From a moral point of view, I think it was completely fine; we did no harm, and it was an experience - children grow on such kind of experiences.

Next, many years later, I was hitch hiking with my wife, and we got stuck in Finnish Lapland. There are three problems in Finnish Lapland in the summer time:

• there is very little traffic there

• only a very small percentage of the few cars that passes stops for hitch hikers (there is a French lady living in Kilpisjärvi ... she's a legend, always stop for hitch hikers, we've had friends visiting us in Tromsø by hitch hiking, and several of them got rescued by this lady ... but I digress)

• There are mosquites. Lots and lots of them! And they are pretty nasty ...

We had travelled far without any stop, we were deadly tired. We didn't have a tent, only sleeping bags. It was raining, and despite the rain the air was thick of mosquitoes. We found one spot where we could sleep close to a building and stay reasonably dry, but we wouldn't be safe from the mosquitoes! Eventually we found this empty cabin, and we decided to squat. We (especially I) was desperate, the mosquitoes really love me, so eventually we broke the padlock and entered. Juridically a very bad thing to do, but morally ... this was clealy an unused cabin, there were no furnitures or anything - just the walls, ceiling and floor. Except the destroyed padlock we did no harm - but being able to stay inside and lock out the mosquitoes, it was a life saver for us that night. Well, eventually after a while we discovered there was a hole in the wall under the ceiling at one point, so we could as well have slept on the outside. I tried closing the sleeping back as much as I could, but I needed to breathe ... I had so many mosquito stings around my mouth and nose the next morning, I looked terrible in the mirror (plus that I kept my wife awake most of the night). But I digress again ...