No 2 (Jobless - minus 3 weeks)

I Dreamed a Dream

Much like Susan Boyle, I have been dreaming a dream. Certainly not a dream of instant musical fame and dramatic eyebrow rehabilitation, but a rather more prosaic dream in which I was more than the number of billable hours I worked.

Like many in the City, I am the product of the route that seems set in stone when you’re young and have demonstrated some level of academic aptitude. Study hard for exams, get good marks, go to a good university and get a career. By career, I mean a “good career”, something definable. In other words, choose from the steady and respectable doctor-lawyer-accountant triumvirate. Earn money, buy a nice pad somewhere leafy - probably Clapham - work cripplingly long hours and after one too many glasses of wine, reminisce about the ideals you had as students and how different it all could have been if you’d followed that dream.

In many ways maybe the recession could be the best thing to happen to a generation of young people, a call to arms for all those stuck in "good careers" entered to please the parents and to earn enough money to make a dent in astronomical student debts. For law firms, investment banks and the big accountancy firms have long loitered in the atria of Britain’s higher education establishments, handing out funky logo-d goodies and grabbing impressionable and impoverished bright young things from the arms of their alma maters. Many of these students, usually armed with nothing more than a history degree and three overdrafts, have the starry-eyed idea that they will take the City’s money for a couple of years before running into the warm embrace of a job in the not-for-profit sector, or, more excitingly, give it all up to dash off that literary opus they were always intending to write. However once you’ve tasted dinner at the Ivy, bought a bit of Balenciaga from Net-a-Porter and holidayed in the Hamptons, it’s so very hard to think about giving it all up for poverty, poetry and Primark.

But for my own sanity I had to leave the confines of my City office, throwing away my City salary but also my City malaise. My optimism that I will find a more fulfilling job (or even a job, let's be honest) may well be entirely misplaced and the goody-two-shoes, academic achiever in me wonders what the hell my foolish, impulsive other self has decided to do. But I don’t want to wake up ten years down the line without having indulged the increasingly persistent voices in my head telling me that there must be more to life than working my ass off to join the pop your collar, let's watch rugger Clapham crowd.

So I’ve taken the first steps towards my Suboesque dream; now I just have to figure out how to go about reclaiming my soul and earning enough money to keep my eyebrows in check.

No. 1 (Jobless - minus 1 month)

Working 9 to 5

I am a City lawyer and I am ginger.

Or, more accurately, I used to be a City lawyer, because today I handed in my notice. Now I am no longer a City lawyer but (unfortunately) remain a ginger.

It all started this afternoon when I broke the cardinal rule of the office. This is a rule I’ve religiously observed ever since I first started life as a professional. Never cry in the workplace or, at least, if emotion does overwhelm you, only let tears mess up your mascara once you’ve reached the safety of the ladies’. Today, the one rule I had held so dear throughout my (undeniably short) legal career, was openly violated. Worse still, this display of emotional vulnerability took place in my boss’s office.


I chose an insignificant Friday in the middle of these credit crunch blighted days to throw in the legal towel, with no job to go to and only a vague idea of what I wanted to do. No cosy alternative career in banking or management consultancy lined up, no swift side-step into legal recruitment on the horizon. Don’t get me wrong, this was not a spur of the moment decision made in the face of one too many comments from brandy-breathed clients about my legs or one too many late nights spent looking at spreadsheets and dying on the inside. No, this decision was arrived at after six months of consideration.

In my boss’s huge glass office, my announcement was met with consternation: “But, I don’t understand, you have no job to go to, what will you do? You do realise we are in a recession?!....” I reassured him that the country’s economic plight had not passed me by and tried in vain to explain that I did not want to spend the rest of my days measuring my time in six minute units and using such terms as “let’s not reinvent the wheel” and “shall we touch base”(which always struck me as slightly obscene anyway... no one's touching my base).

He told me he would hold onto my resignation letter until I had re-gained my senses. I told him he could do as he wished, but my mind was made up.

So tomorrow I will wake up as an ex City lawyer.

Jobless.....and ginger.