My advice
My advice is to do nothing (apart from maybe some fun PPL flying) for a year or even two. I have to agree with WWW - it's as bad now as I've ever seen it and I've been in aviation (though not as a pilot) since 1995.
I spoke with some old BA chums last week. Their soom and gloom shocked me - there are possibl going to be hundreds less BA pilots flying in a couple of years and my own company Flybe has frozen all recruitment for the foreseeable future and they have always been a solid recruiter of low hours types. Only Ryanair seems to be recruiting and you have to ask yourself if you are prepared to subject yourself to that after spending £60-£100k.
As an aside if I were young and keen to fly there's no question the best flying in the UK is to be had in the RAF. I have flown with many ex RAF pilots in the past couple of years and have been astounded by how much better in many ways life as an RAF pilot is than in the airline sector nowadays. They pay ALL your training, you get to fly some of the most fantastic hardware around, you get paid far more than you would in any likely first airline job, plus the flying is far more exciting and from what I can gather the hours are a dammned sight more sociable too! Many of the guys I fly with are ex- Herc and Nimrod and seemingly they didn't fly anything like as much as us airline guys do, had miles more time off, got to visit loads of interesting places (which they actually had time to explore) and they hardly seemed to fly at weekends or at the antisocial times many airline guys have to!
I'm not even mentioning the cheap beer, the culture, the training, the pension at age 40 and the kudos with babes that saying you're an RAF pilot still has!
I know which ay I'd be heading if I had my time again! Then after 10-20 years of the world's best flying you can still become a civilian pilot if that floats your boat!
Don't get me wrong, I love civilian flying, but there's no question there has been a dramatic sea change in the working hours versus the pay in the past ten years. There are a few bastions of high pay and civilised lifestyle left - Thomsonfly, BA, Virgin, Monarch, Thomas Cook but those are the jobs everybody wants and they're also the airlines who aren't recruiting!
Desk-pilot