Today I bumped into the owner of the flat downstairs for the first time since before Christmas. The story of my various experiences with him since he bought the flat in June last year is long and largely dull, but suffice to say that things took a turn for the worse when he started excavating a large basement without consent from myself, the Wandsworth planning department or local building control. As I said to him in one of our first meetings, I don't know much about construction, but I know a little about gravity, and frankly as the owner of the upper flat, I was concerned.

I've learned the hard way to trust nothing that comes out of this man's mouth and this makes him a rather curious character to deal with. I don't know whether he's a compulsive liar or a hopeless fantasist but for the purposes of this blog I will refer to him as The Baron, in honour of his Munchhausian tendencies and frequent boasts of a small property empire.

Since first meeting The Baron, he has told me a variety of different accounts about his intentions for the flat once development is complete:

1. He will live there himself
2. He will sell it
3. He will rent it out
4. He will leave it empty
5. He will let his relatives stay in it
6. He will give it to his young son, whose life's purpose will then be to make sure I'm never able to sell my own flat, even if that's 15 years in the future

Now that I was face to face with The Baron I took the opportunity to air my various grievances: the overflowing skip, his total unreachability on his mobile over the last two weeks and the fact that due to his building materials taking up over three parking spaces in front of the house some overzealous neighbours had piled rubbish up against my front door.

He said the skip was the fault of the skip rental company, that his phone had been switched off because the government were monitoring his calls, and that the rubbish outside the house was "probably foxes".

I tell him I'm tired of talking with him directly and that all future communications will be through a solicitor. He tells me that if I don't retrospectively consent to the basement he has now more or less completed (which is my single point of leverage) that he will rent the basement to North Korea as a European base for medium-range missiles.

I say I don't believe him, if only because he's lied to me so many times in the past. He's says he not lying and offers to show me the house he owns on Lavender Hill that he's currently allowing the Pakistan government to use as a base for their nuclear testing programme.