IT’S the first month of a new year and time to take stock of 2005, so here goes. Interviews attended: six, including one I went to by mistake (very bad); proper job offers: none (even worse); part-time work: a bit here and there; shelves put up: five, four of which fell down (I said I didn’t do DIY); ironing and cooking done: bloody endless; chocolate biscuits eaten while waiting for phone to ring: three a day (packets, that is — working from home should carry a government health warning).

Journalism, for men of my age, is a bit like the old joke about adolescent self-abuse: the world divides into those who admit that they once wanted to be like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame, and those who lie. Well, my Washington Post reporter fantasy vanished after about three months, but I never thought I’d get to this. Twelve months or so on from the four-line fax that screwed up my job like a useless contract and tossed it into the bin, and here I am — Bridget Jones in trousers.

And yet I could put a lot more positive things into the list of my new life. There’s the gym, for a start. I’ve been going for work-outs more often than I can remember for years, and it’s a revelation.

How effective it is, I’m not sure. My son occasionally strolls past with a supercilious smile, strokes his biceps and observes that the last person to pick up the weights over which I’m sweating blood wore plaits and a gymslip. But it feels good, even if you have to take my claims of being super-fit at fifty-plus with a large pinch of low-sodium flavouring agent.

And I’ve learnt a lot of things. One is that a sense of humour is an expensive luxury. That lesson was taught me by the health-and-safety chief of a tobacco firm whom I had to interview. For some reason, he didn’t share my view that such a job in such a firm was intrinsically funny, a bit like being animal welfare officer for a company of ratcatchers. It’s a lesson I learnt before, in the same way that small boys find out that too much chocolate cake makes them sick — I may know it’s true, but that won’t make me alter my behaviour.

More important, I’m finally starting to work out what I want to do, and what I don’t. I’ve talked to other people about it until I suspect they run a mile when they see me coming, but I think that was the only way for me to figure it out.

For all my grumbling, I enjoy the bits and pieces of freelance writing that have been keeping the wolf from the door. I’m up to my ears in writing a book, and I had a road-to-Damascus moment recently when I realised that whatever else I end up with, I want to keep doing that.

I know I don’t want a go-into-the-office, company-pension kind of job anymore, although I would welcome some sort of part-time work that did not involve writing and would give me a bit of company a couple of days a week. Sorting that out is a priority for 2006.

And, most important of all, I’m finding through writing Aftershock that there are thousands of people just like me, getting over the first shock of losing a job that had seemed to be there for life, and having to reorganise their lives.

Some are looking for more of the same — stepping into another role that is much like the one they left — but others are making a complete break, opening bed-and-breakfast places, starting small businesses or taking jobs in some field they had never dreamt of. The e-mails I get are sometimes bitter, occasionally sad, often slightly bewildered, but overwhelmingly positive.

A little bit of anger helps as well. Most of us have no idea why the job went up in smoke, and it’s much better to be cross than sorry for yourself. But I think the best advice I’ve had came from the first expert I talked to, Jean Roberts.

She said: “People often waver at first between fear of letting go of all the familiar things and a huge confidence that they are about to make a really positive change in their lives.”

Roberts is a chartered occupational psychologist and a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, so I should have known from the start that she knew what she was talking about, but I can confess now that my first unspoken response was that she must be barking. Losing your job is a bloody disaster, not a career opportunity, I thought to myself. But I see now, 12 months later, that she was right. The positive changes are happening, slowly but surely just as she said they would, and it’s a better world a year after I lost my job than it was a year before.

The professionals can point out the right direction, with contacts for new jobs or advice on how to write a CV or fill in an application form, and there are a lot of academics with interesting views on the best strategy for restarting a career, but the important answers have to come from you. There is nobody else who can sort out what you want and how many compromises you are ready to make to get it.

But in the background there is a definite Aftershock community, even if many of us are too independent-minded and cantankerous to use a word like that. I’ve learnt from the e-mails and from my own experience that the one thing you never do is give up. It’s only by writing letter after unacknowledged letter, e-mail after fruitless e-mail, that you get the suggestion, the meeting, the client or the job offer you want.

In the meantime there are all the unexpected benefits you never dreamt of, such as the new skills you pick up. I may not be Woodward, Bernstein or the next John Humphrys, and Tolstoy may not be quaking in heaven at the thought of my future literary achievements, but you should see the shirts I iron nowadays. No one, but no one, does a collar like I do.

Contact Andrew Taylor at aftershock@sunday-times.co.uk

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