Career-change cures for a mid-life crisis

Self-employment has been one of the strategies many people have adopted to stave off the United Kingdom's malaise known as austerity. Midlife men, facing redundancy, or boredom, or career crises, seem to be especially adept at coming up with job schemes that will permit them an opportunity for reinvention as well as financial survival in their coming pension-bereft later years.

Deciding what to do can be fun, especially if helped along with a few drinks. Contemplating an office-free future with a few mates is like appearing on Dragon's Den without having to face down the four smug self-made bores and submitting to the donkey work of business plans and swot analyses.

This might be why so many of us hatch wonderful escape plans that include brewing craft ales, saddle-making or running a market stall that showcases our home-made pickles, watercolours or handcarved flotsam. Although, according to Professor Roger Seifert, a human resources expert at Wolverhampton Business School, we're only following in the clog-steps of our pre-modern ancestors - many of whom of course never had pensions, retirement ages or, indeed, careers.