Meet the laddies who lunch

As 30-year-old Guy Davison gets up in the morning, his wife Claire is going out of the door of their Pimlico home. He has breakfast, goes to the gym and reads the newspaper. "That takes me to lunchtime, when I often meet up with friends.

Then I go to Tesco for the shopping, do the washing, and maybe drop by a museum." The former City boy, who used to earn £250,000 a year, has dinner waiting on the table for his spouse, a business analyst at Carphone Warehouse, by the time she gets home.

Davison is one of a growing number of laddies who lunch. When the dotcom bubble burst and the economy slowed down, many bankers and dotcom entrepreneurs found themselves out of a job. And according to a survey last week, one in 10 men now has a partner who's the main or only breadwinner. Not all these laddies who lunch had leisure time thrust upon them, some have opted to take a break from the rat race to reassess their lives: more than two-thirds of 24-35-year-olds in the same survey revealed that their goal in life was to achieve a stress-free existence. For some, this means days spent shopping for clothes, meeting friends for lunch and visiting the gym to work on their body beautiful.

Guy Davison, who starts a new job in the Civil Service in a couple of months, relishes his time off. "I was sacked from Lehman Brothers in September. I definitely wanted to leave the City, which was just terrible, painful, despicable," he says. "Since then, I've been to the Caribbean and Grenada, gone skiing and painted my nephew's playroom - all guiltfree. It's a great way to avert an early-life crisis."

Here we talk to other highflyers in their thirties and forties who left or lost their jobs and find out if they enjoy life as a laddie who lunches.

Andrew Williams, 36, lives in Olympia. He was at King's College School, Wimbledon, followed by Bristol University, where he got a first in modern history. He was made redundant by his dotcom company late last year. He is single.

I was earning a healthy wage as senior vice-president of global marketing for iXL in San Francisco - but in November, the marketing department was nuked. Job prospects in the States looked terrible and in the virtual absence of any redundancy payment, I came home. Another friend of mine was also "resting" and so we would regularly meet up and do lunch. I discovered a whole daytime world out there of people who seem to do that all the time, unencumbered by the need to work. Lunch was a good time to hook up with various working mates, too - hopefully at their or their company's expense. The only depressing bit was the occasional panic attack or depression that followed a job rejection, never something I've found easy to accept. However, once I'd secured a new job in charge of marketing for NXT (a company making loudspeakers out of flat panels), I relished the rest of my time off and went to Brazil to make new friends, perfect my samba skills and explore the Amazon.

Bob Crompton, 41, read computing at Leeds University, lives in Kensington and is married to a merchant banker. His dotcom business collapsed last September.

I was working in technology development for a dotcom business called Alter Ego, earning about £100,000 a year. Then last September I was made redundant. It's been quite a leap. Nothing was going well in the financial world, either, so my wife took time off from her merchant banking job. She got a good pay-off and I made some money out of my dotcom shares, so we decided to burn some cash. Since September, we've walked round Provence, the West Coast of the States and the Pembrokeshire coast. We walked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and up again in one day and climbed Kilimanjaro. Now we've taken a chalet in Chamonix for the ski season. When we're in London, we spend a lot of time lunching with friends or going to parties. When I eventually return to gainful employment, I'll work two or three days a week. It's been life-changing and I never want to go back to being a full-time employee.

Nick Burnett, 36, was educated at Harrow and the University of Kansas, where he studied economics. He made a "hefty profit" from his telecom company and then decided to take time out. He lives in Chiswick with his fiancée, who runs a beauty salon. I set up a telecoms business which I sold for a lot of money in March 2001 - just before the market went downhill. Then I took some time off and went to Miami, the Caribbean, Grenada and France. In August, 10 of us who have fun cars drove through France and Italy. Then I went to Greece in September and proposed to my girlfriend. She has a beauty salon in Hampton. She was glad she saw more of me, but jealous I was being a bum while she had to work. By then, I thought, I've had six months off, and there's only so much Jerry Springer you can watch. I'm now looking forward to doing the evening schmoozing at Zig Zag, the bar I'm opening in Notting Hill. I've wasted so much money in other people's bars, why not sink £150,000 into my own? But the quality of leisure time I've had is something I will keep up.

Dr James Lee, 37 was educated in China and Britain, and has degrees in architecture, engineering and a PhD in geotechnology. He was part of the design team responsible for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. He has a girlfriend, an advertising executive, and lives in Dulwich.

I was the lead designer for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link on £70,000 a year, but I decided to quit a month ago, and now spend my time having lunch, chilling out and indulging in the occasional yoga session. My life has changed enormously - it's had a huge psychological impact. I don't know when I want to go back to work. I want time to myself. My girlfriend thought it was great to have me around more. You also find out who you are and what you want. Life without the office is completely different. There's a purpose in your work day and that's replaced by other things. I've spent the last month in New York and China. It's a matter of highs and lows because you're not in the normal rhythm. There's a happiness in little things that you'd forgotten. I have no idea what I'd like to do next, and I like it like that.

Serge Chiaramonte, 36, is French and did a business degree at Lausanne University. A former banker, he lives with his wife and two children in Fulham.

I worked at Deutsche Bank and Lehman Brothers from 1991 earning a six-to-seven figure sum. Four years ago, my wife Sara started her fashion business, Tashia, from our bedroom. Within 12 months, she was supplying 400 shops around the world. It got to the stage that we were both exhausted, so we sat down and reassessed. We were working too hard to spend our earnings and could never take holidays. There didn't seem any point in life if we were both worn out and not having any fun, so we decided I should leave Lehman's. I'm able to spend time with my children and have a quality of life which I definitely didn't have before. I look at all our friends who have to get up at 6am every day and I've never looked back - I've never regretted my decision for a minute.