I know in my bones that the Lagoon SEVENTY 8 is the one. She’s fucking gorgeous—a seventy-eight-foot masterclass in nautical design with lightweight carbon fibre hulls and an owner’s suite so luxurious I swear it gives me a semi. While my mates increasingly choose to spend their time swapping their fuck-me cologne for regurgitated breast milk, I’ll be cruising around the Caribbean with my on-deck jacuzzi and rainfall shower, living the dream with a different woman in every island harbour.

Commissioning my very own SEVENTY 8 is a straightforward decision made even easier now that my brother has persuaded our family to appoint his indecently hot new girlfriend as the head of our foundation. She, in turn, has us pledging to reduce our joint wealth by seventy-five per cent over the next two decades.

That’s around six billion pounds, a sum so vast it makes me want to curl up into a ball and weep like a baby when I think about it. While none of us will ever find ourselves near the breadline, collecting shiny toys like this may become less of a no-brainer going forward. I may as well go crazy with the toy acquisitions while the golden times are still upon us.

Besides, if Gabe can spend millions on a five-hundred-year-old prayer book from Sotheby’s—I kid you not—I can sure as fuck spend the same on an honest-to-God piece of kit.

The icing on the cake is Vanessa, the leggy honey-blonde salesperson currently doing a stellar job of looking after me. She’s even valiantly pretending not to be repulsed by my dog, Mark. He may be my favourite sentient creature on this planet, but, God bless him, with his mismatched eyes and weirdly short legs, his looks won’t be flooding anyone’s Instagram feed in the near future. Vanessa’s commission on a sale like this must be eye-watering, but I’d like to think that’s real attraction in her big blue eyes.

Attraction to me, that is.

Not Mark.

She’s just as sleek and pretty and, I bet, high maintenance, as my glorious carbon fibre buddy here. Mark, however, is having none of it. He shunned her attempt at petting him by trundling pointedly off to lie in front of the reception desk.

‘Let’s get you a cold beer while we go over your bespoke specifications,’ she purrs, batting her long eyelashes at me. ‘There’s a lot to go through.’

I shoot her the playboy grin I know she’s expecting before surreptitiously glancing at my watch. My research ahead of this showroom visit was a rabbit hole of feverish hyper-focus, but the biochemical thrill of deciding on such a sizeable purchase is already dissipating at the prospect of being cornered with pages and pages of questions around leather finish and carpet colour and cabin layouts.

Kill me now.