GUEST COMMENT: The great and overlooked pleasures of unemployment

Following a redundancy and in between the inevitable soul searching, hand wringing and the type of panic that varies from 'Well this is a bit of a pickle' to 'I wonder if there's space under Waterloo Bridge tonight', being unemployed can have some surprising upsides:

1. Getting your money's worth from your mortgage

Rather than treating your own house like a hotel and appearing at night merely to crash and burn before getting up to do it all over again, unemployment means you can actually use your bricks and mortar asset. This is positive if you spend your time doing all those little jobs, odd bits of DIY and general filing that have been piling up, and negative if you end up spending all day in bed staring at the ceiling while building a student-like pile of dirty dishes to trip over should you ever emerge from your pit.

2. Tormenting those still in employment

For the unemployed, meeting ex colleagues regularly and in the City has two main benefits. Firstly the consumption of free lunch/drinks/dinner as they couldn't possibly expect you to pay in your current situation, could they? Secondly, the opportunity to boost what remains of your self esteem by lying about how much fun you're having. Extra points here if it's sunny and you have a garden or terrace to spend time on. If it's raining (and it probably will be) just focus on the lie-ins and quality time with the family (your currently overworked and fearful audience of the still-employed will have forgotten what that really means and won't remember the inevitable refereeing of squabbles, tidying up and endless washing that this requires). If you don't have a family substitute that for TV/PlayStation/booze cupboard/car.

3. Listening to 'Thought for the Day'

Those of us who have spent a career arriving in the office by or before the magic cut off of 7.30am don't know what we've been missing. At approximately 7.45 every day a two minute segment of The Today programme can be absolutely guaranteed to have you spitting with fury, throwing things at your radio and inventing new swear words to fit the mood. Listening in is therefore both creative and guaranteed to ensure that, in comparison, the rest of the day will be a pleasure.

4. Planning

Planning can truly take up hours of an unemployed person's time. Planning covers macro aspects of your life, such as finding a new job, all the way to the more micro aspects of realising it's only 9.30am and you have no idea what to do for the rest of the day until your spouse/children/cat come home. Inevitably, planning will include the intention of regular sessions at the gym (probably daily for maximum impact) in order to be in peak physical condition when the new job appears. However, unless you have young children who are still at home and need to be escaped from, this will forever remain in the planning stages (but you won't cancel your gym membership...no one ever does).

5. Staying up reeeeeeally late

If there's absolutely no reason for you to get up in the morning then there is no such thing as bed time. You can stay up as late as you like watching repeats of Mock the Week, Have I Got News For You and Top Gear on Dave...sometimes for four or five hours at a time...no need to change the channel. Only truly depressing when you're watching the same set of episodes as the last time you were made redundant, or if you're also watching it in bed (see point 1 above).