Recession killed my OE

London is a great place to be right now. They have this festival on at the moment called Recession.

The only downside is that tickets are the cost of a tube ride, the queues are really long and you can't wash in the local river.

It also means that if you're unemployed, you have to work twice as hard to get work, and if you are employed, you have to work twice as hard as you did before.

But there's no point worrying because getting work is almost impossible.

So if you're looking for the kind of lifestyle that involves living in a flat beyond your means and becoming famous on the recruitment stage as the person with the quickest run up the corporate ladder - last week my CV said "hack", this week, "Rupert Murdoch's future nemesis" - I recommend you move to Britain.

Even better than the job market, it snows there. And when it snows, the entire city shuts down. Once again, you don't have to worry about such tiresome things as getting to work.

You may be wondering why I left such a fulfilling lifestyle, especially as my boyfriend was the one going to work every day while I got to sit at home and look down the snowy street and have super chats with companies enjoying recruitment freezes - I'm telling you, it's cold there - and attempt to occupy myself in the hope that I'd not turn on the TV and watch endless reruns of The X Factor.

Well, I got back a few weeks ago.

It's a little embarrassing because we left at the end of March last year after a nice big party at which I cried every time someone hugged me and told me what a fantastic time we were going to have living in the City of Opportunity, and how much would happen during the next five years.

At that moment, I pictured myself strutting down Oxford Street in a pair of expensive Italian boots - paid for by my imaginary new job in Fleet Street - while my friends back home got busy making babies, changing their hair colour and training for marathons and all those things people do in your absence that make time feel as though it has passed.

We didn't race straight to the Recession Festival but instead opted for cocktail hour through Southeast Asia, where some of the people we met had never been to a festival as such, and yet lived healthy, happy lives doing the things people in London now consider a novelty.

One of these guys, a Cambodian man who'd lost his mother and brother to the Khmer Rouge genocide in the 1970s, didn't care that his T-shirt was ripped and his kids didn't have iPods. He was happy to be alive.

Happy that the chicken his friend had just beheaded was not and he could marinate it in coconut milk and roast it for lunch.

But then we arrived in London in July to find the festival was cranking and life was going to be a bit different to what we'd expected. It took three months of job-hunting for a permanent role before the celebratory mood got the better of me.

I was ready to pack up the tent, even if I wasn't ready to admit it to myself yet.

By this stage I'd "gone freelance", which in such events means "working as a writer and other odd jobs".

Not too different from the original game plan except the odd jobs started to dry up in December. (The oddest had me covering reception at an upmarket property agency so the boys could go clay pigeon shooting because funnily enough, no one was buying 6 million flats this year).

And so, in a bizarre case of serendipity, on one fine winter evening in London, warming ourselves in front of the heaters, the other half rang his old office in New Zealand and they happened to be interviewing. Unheard of.

They offered him a job on the spot and, two weeks later, we were back, trying to convince our friends they had actually missed us.

In 10 months, I like to think I've not returned bitter. Just a bit more twisted. And disappointed only one person has changed their hair colour.

Anyway, my sister and her partner, who arrived in London a month before we did, are still there, both working - he in fact has finally got a job after seven persistent months. Another of my best friends is there, albeit minus half her work team.

And two couples I know are returning to London (although one lost her job late last year and isn't sure what the future holds). The City of Opportunity is not what it once was.

But nothing in life is guaranteed, is it? At least I've come home, sweet home, to an opportunity to tell you about it.

* This new column by Rebecca Barry will appear fortnightly.