WHEN I wrote the first After-shock column a couple of years ago, looking at how people coped with being kicked off the treadmill and into the gutter, I had just lost my own job and was frightened.

At the time I said I was going to burn the suit and find a new life. I said it with a confident swagger I didn’t really feel: I had never been out of work before, and now it had happened to me. I had no money and, at 53, there didn’t seem to be much prospect of finding a job that would get me any.

You have only to look at the papers to know that, since then, things have got worse - and nobody expects them to get better any time soon.

One survey suggests that 25% of jobs in information technology are likely to be moved offshore by 2010, while another has 38% of companies planning redundancies over the next few months. The next time Sir Alan Sugar points his finger and snarls, “You’re fired” he could be looking at you.

News stories make it sound as if redundancy is stalking the land dressed in a long hooded gown and carrying a scythe over his shoulder. The slightly guilty feeling of satisfaction the rest of us might feel over stories of well-paid City boys and estate agents being shown the door is tempered by the fear that the next knock might be for us.

But what I have learnt from my own experience, and from those of the hundreds of Sunday Times readers who e-mailed the After-shock column, is that fear of redundancy is like fear of the dark - most of the time, it’s all in your mind.

There were a few people who sounded battered and beaten, but the message of the vast majority of e-mails was surprising: “It’s the best thing that could have happened to you.” These weren’t people smugly trousering large redundancy cheques and riffling through the glitzy share options, although there were one or two of those, but ordinary folk who had seen their self-esteem, their finances and futures all flushed away. They had all had the same shock to their egos that I had suffered and they all had to start reassessing the plans they had made for how they were going to live today and fund their retirement tomorrow, but they had found that was a small price to pay for a new start to their lives.

Since then, I have spoken to the director (unpaid) of a Berkshire branch of the Samaritans, who took on the role after being made redundant for the third time in his life. Chris - he did not want to use his family name because the Samaritans have strict rules about not talking about themselves in connection with their work - had a well-paid, senior job as a programme manager for Cable & Wireless, and was a part-time Samaritans volunteer.

“When I heard I was going to be made redundant again, I was all set for a pretty horrendous time, but then I was elected to this post as director,” he said. He spends about 15 hours a week working on Samaritans business, and reckons that, with the thinking time and planning time, it would be difficult to maintain the same commitment alongside a full-time job.

“I did the sums and worked out that I could just about manage without a paid job,” he said. “So often in business you are managing a virtual team that you never see, but here I am running a team of around 90 volunteers whom I know and whom I meet face to face all the time. This is just the best job I’ve ever had.”

Then there was the former nurse who became a funeral director, taking the skills she had developed in dealing with people in grief and despair and using them in a new career; the former television producer who was earning half as much but feeling twice as happy after reinventing himself as an actor; an accountant who had become a hypno-therapist and an accountant who had taken up designing gardens.

And then there was me. Along the way, I got turned down for more jobs than I can count - I could have been the finest choco-latier in the history of gastronomy if only the company involved had not thought I was either too old or too greedy; I found out that I was the Mr Bean of plumbing, only slightly less competent; I tried my hand at teaching, and I thought of driving a cab. I even applied for a couple of jobs in the world of television where I had worked before, and shivered with relief when I failed to get them.

The question I had to face, like all the readers whose e-mails I had read, was the simplest, yet also the toughest in the world: What did I want? If the answer is that you want another job like your old one, then that’s fine. You have to put yourself about and try to find one. At least, unlike all the grey-faced zombies struggling unwillingly onto the train every morning, you will have made a decision.

But for loads of people, there is a very different answer. As so often happens, it was staring me in the face all the time, though it took me a while to see it. Since the shock of losing a job that, to be honest, I had never really liked that much, I have written a couple of books, and I am well into another. Are they going to make me rich? No, not unless something extremely unexpected happens. But am I happy? Yes, like the people who wrote all those e-mails that kept me going when I thought I would end up sleeping under the arches, I am happier than I have ever been.

To be honest, there was a time when I read words like that and thought, “You smug pig” - and I guess there will be people in the position I was in, thinking that right now. But one of the useful lessons you get from redundancy is that, however well things are going, they can go downhill very fast and unexpectedly. It is a useful corrective against smugness.

What you also know, though, is that the stooped figure with the scythe is not that scary after all. Peep under the hood, and you might just find it is not so much the Grim Reaper but more an out-of-season Santa Claus bringing the best gift you have ever had.

Andrew Taylor’s latest book, Burning the Suit, based on the Aftershock column, is published by Capstone, priced at £14.99

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