After more than 17 years, I am leaving the company that I started with David and Nick, and bizarrely I am the last of the three founders to go. (Cheers for that boys.)
To the amazing mentors and huge characters that have guided me, and to the talented colleagues who have supported and inspired me, I thank you all. (Put the tissues away.)
After trying to serially replace myself since 1994 with the geniuses Nick McClean, Tess Alps, John Harlow, Jon Wilkins, Tony Regan and Mark Holden, they all inconveniently buggered off first. (Cheers for that as well.)
Thankfully, the wonderful Louise Jones and Jonathan Fowles, Drum's giants Loll and Simon, Mark Sherwood and Chris Stevenson and many others have all had the good grace to continue the ideas crusade beyond my tenure here. PHD has been a source of self-discovery, shared pride and, of course, some huge regrets.
It made my father proud of me after 40 years of trying to impress him, and made me become totally fearless, quite wealthy and so selfish that I lost my wife and nearly my children as well.
Yet, we in media are blessed to be in an amazing rollercoaster of a profession and make of that phrase what you will. To share an adventure with the most special people you may ever meet and establish the friendships that can define one's life is proof enough for me of this privilege. May I wish you the same good fortune.
And now I can go, albeit not very far away. PHD is in the best of hands and the rudest of health. I am confident that despite my residual initial in its name, I am no longer defined by it and it no longer needs me.
It lives and breathes independently and I am once more free to stretch myself as a person and not be defensively shackled to past achievements.
Similarly, now also seems like the right time to end my tenure as a MediaWeek columnist, and this will be my last missive in these pages.
Whatever my fate, I will face it with gratitude, some wisdom, blind optimism and, hopefully, one hell of a guardian angel to cover for me. I must surely be the luckiest bastard to ever walk on God's green earth.
Jonathan Durden is president and co-founder of PHD
jonathan.durden@haymarket.com.