There will be many knock-on effects of the current financial crisis, not least the emergence of a new species of Unemployed Man about the house. Wives of bankers beware: you thought cancelling the flower deliveries and turning off the swimming- pool heating was the worst of it, but you have not reckoned on the other immediate consequence of redundancy: a man without an office to go to.

As someone whose husband was once between jobs for a few weeks, I can confirm that the male sex approaches time at home differently to women. We do pottering, and the last thing we need is a “project”. Not so men. To them, unemployment is an opportunity to restructure your lives, starting with the running of the house. Everything from the supermarket shop to bed-making is an opportunity for rationalising.

Naturally, Unemployed Man needs an office from which to co-ordinate this domestic overhaul — aka your dressing table. And he needs stationery. And a special light. One day he is happily living by your mutually agreed rules, the next he is like a cross between an auditor, your mother and Patrick Bergin in Sleeping with the Enemy — regrouping the towels in the airing cupboard and policing the traces of mayonnaise in the binned Hellmann’s jar. (Note to bankers’ wives: this phase will not last. In a few weeks, he will revert to watching Judge Judy on a loop, with a stack of Pringles on his chest.) But, first, he must do the domestic-master thing.

To begin with, there’s the shopping. Man shopping is not good at the best of times, but Unemployed Man shopping makes you long for the days when he just ignored the list and bought potato mashers. The Unemployed Man shopping trolley will typically include two special-offer Gressingham duck the size of toddlers (ie, impossible to freeze), 2 litres of pineapple and orange squash (he didn’t notice the pineapple element), eight individual rice puddings (buy one, get five free, sell-by-date today), and so on. It’s the same with cleaning. Man cleaning is nothing to write home about; Unemployed Man cleaning is the same, only executed with a feverish intensity that puts everyone on edge.

And then, of course, there’s Unemployed Man life rethinking. The moment men are unemployed, they hit the property internet sites to find out how much your house is worth, and then do some “What if?” research, which involves checking out fire-gutted pubs in Northumberland or failed vineyards in the Loire. Plus, Unemployed Man buys all his Christmas presents, whatever time of year, on Iwantoneofthose.com (they all have to go back). They start writing a novel. They take up painting. They go running at weird times of the day. The charity work kicks in around week four, but that is usually short-lived.

Look, what can I tell you — life will not be the same until he has another desk to go to.

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