I can’t decide whether the news of the Sous Chef’s redundancy is bad news or good.

On the one hand, he wasn’t happy at his job and actually wants to go and do something completely different. He wants out of I.T.  I can’t say I blame him. If I were to wave a magic wand and give him his ideal job I’d probably make him an abseiling instructor or something. That’s how I see him and he has a great manner with kids of various ages.  Unfortunately there is a long queue of experienced scout leaders and youth workers who would be ahead of him. He has also never abseiled, as far as I know – but I still reckon he’d love that sort of job and be really good at it.

We can live on a smaller income than we’ve been on these past few years. It’s not as if we’ve been living at our  means. We’ve lived below them for a while and as neither of us is into status symbols and don’t have kids to worry about it, we can live on a smaller income that many of his colleagues could. He earns quite well but we  can live on less without it hurting too much.

But I’m afraid of this large, unknown future. When we go on our round-the-world bicycle trip we will be entirely unfettered and free which is great but also terrifying.  Normally you go away but you have a home to go back to. When you’re done cycling about, you come home and carry on life as normal. This time around there is no job, potentially no house and what do you do then?  We could go away, come back and – nothing.  It feels like taking all the playing pieces off the board and having to start again.

That scares me.  I don’t know why it should. I’ve done relocating to a new country clutching only one suitcase and cabin luggage several times before . I’ve started from almost zero a few times and somehow that can be very liberating and exciting, but I’ve always had a little bit of a safety net.  There has always been a starting square,  a roof over my head, someone to meet me at the airport. I’ve never looked a year into the future and seen me as just a bit of drift wood.

But here is our plan: The sous chef works until the end of August and I will continue with my job as normal. I finish my degree in January 2010 so we could actually begin our RTW (round the world) trip in February. I’ll quit my job (or beg for a sabbatical) and we cycle RTW for a year. We come back February 2011 maybe back to his house (if we haven’t sold it or are renting it out) and we both start looking for work. I’m supposed to do a career change into psychology around then and TSC has no idea what he’ll be doing. The idea is, I become the one with the greater earning potential. God knows how I’ll find work in this new field, but I am sure I could rely on my admin experience to get temp jobs or something for the first few months back in UK while I scout around for something in my new field.

It all just seems so unclear. Career change/address change/life change. I’m actually terrified.