So this time last year I had been a victim of the ‘credit crunch’ and was bemoaning life with my colleague who had, despite her general brilliance and PR genius, suffered the same fate. It was cold, I was single, I didn’t have a job, and things could have looked pretty bleak. For some unknown reason it had the opposite effect on me. Now the ‘worst’ had happened I wasn’t worried any more and proceeded to get a job in a gift shop and begin a creative writing course. I loved my Sundays listening to jazz and swing and selling white-painted wardrobes and my once a week discipline of learning how to write a novel opening or create a setting for a book.
Come January I registered my company and have now been freelancing at Directgov for nearly a year. We’re about to launch a huge national TV campaign and have moved out of the ‘reactive’ mode into a proactive team making front-page news.
Perhaps to say that redundancy turned out to be ‘the best thing that could have happened to me’
might sound a bit strong and could sound insulting to anyone who has not had my luck. But when I met yesterday with the friend who shared my fate, she too has found life to be improved, she’s been promoted twice and bought a flat with her boyfriend. Oh speaking of which, the redundancy also helped me to find romance, but that, as they say, is a different story for another night…