Will Harris has woodworm eating his career ladder

Having so far viewed the recession as yet another fleeting obsession of an hysterical media (bird flu, anyone?), no-one is more surprised than me when a letter lands in my postbox, from my employer, inviting me to an interview for my own job.

“Due to government cuts,” the letter says, “and the effect these will have on our income, the organisation has been forced into the difficult decision to cut one post from your department.”

I gulp. There are only two posts in the department (unless you count our 21-year-old intern, who wears gold jewellery in her fingernails, and of whom I am terrified), which means there is a 50/50 chance that, as of next week, I will be unemployed.

“Unemployed! Me!” I gape at my friend Michael, as his annual post-Christmas, pre-Hogmanay gathering for fags, hags, and hangers-on rages around us. “I mean, I’ve worked since I was 17. I don’t know how to be unemployed.”

“If I’m made unemployed, what am I going to say to people at cocktail parties?”

“No, me neither,” says Michael, who works for a blue chip recruitment agency and who I know for a fact splashed out £450 on this evening (£40 of it on cheese). He peers absently into the depths of the mulled wine he’s been stirring.

“I only deal with the hiring. I think they have someone less attractive do the other end. Speaking of which!” He drops the ladle and grabs me by the shoulders. “Did I tell you what happened to Mulan?”

Mulan, to explain, is what Michael calls his ex-boyfriend, a sour little horror of a human being whose growing dependency on designer make-up and tendency to walk on tip-toe has recently afforded him the look of an 18th century geisha.

“This will make you feel better,” he continues. “Last week Mulan went out on his first date in months, tried to take off his coat, and got entangled in his own snood.”

I smile, but even a good old dose of schadenfreude can’t lift me from my funk. So, as the party gathers round and we raise our flutes to Kate Middleton (this season’s Michelle Obama, as far as the gays are concerned), my mind is elsewhere.

It’s not the money that’s worrying me, or the woodworm busily gnawing away at my career ladder. My most pressing concern, if I’m made unemployed, is what the Hell I’m going to say to people at cocktail parties. “And what do you do?” That’s always the first question, isn’t it, and how will I answer?

Telling the truth is out of the question. I can do without those ego-crushing looks of sympathy, thanks very much, while
sugar-coating it with the old “I’m between jobs” line will just make me sound like a burglar. Hmm. Could I invent a profession? Of course, the idea I might have to stop going to cocktail parties never crosses my mind.