Ok, so this is how it happened. I got selfish. There’s no other way to describe how I arrived at this moment in time.

I have good reasons to be self-obsessed, mind you. Plenty of them. None of them are particularly unique. You know, the usual things: I am temporarily (hopefully) single. I’m on a sabbatical, financed and brought on by the sale of my company and enforced by a pesky non-compete clause. Add to all that the knowledge that I’m sitting firmly in the age category known indefinitely as my extremely, extremely late Thirties and you start to get the picture.

I’m a man with some serious “me” time ahead and I’m not afraid to use it.

So here’s what I plan to do. I intend to build a monument to moi, not a great, huge fuck-off edifice like Michael Jackson did with Neverland, or like Donald Trump did with Trump Tower, or like Napoleon Bonaparte did with, well, all of Paris.

Actually, I’m not like any of those men. I can’t get my head around all that Versace fuss and gold-plated filligree. I’m a minimalist. Always have been, even if I’ve never had the opportunity to exercise my predilection beyond my bedroom. Actually, even that was a failure. I once briefly emptied my bedroom of every piece of furniture, bar a thin, uncomfortable futon on the floor. Then I got lucky and started a relationship. The bedroom soon filled up with other stuff.

Minimalists I now know, can’t be happy in love. Minimalism just doesn’t accommodate second opinions. It’s a single, purist’s pursuit. A pursuit for the lonely, and that’s why my time has come.

Really, I’m not complaining. This is an indulgence that few people have the freedom to experience. I know I’m lucky. I may never have this opportunity again. With nobody to listen to, no competing tastes to accommodate, I can do this with complete control. Well that’s probably not exactly true. I will have to accommodate the tastes of my architect and realistically the issues raised by my builder and the local council and my budget. But overall, I get to make the choices. This is my time at the helm of the “me” project.

The new minimal me.