AN interior designer I follow on Instagram posted a picture of her new telly the other day.

It was designed to look like a picture frame, light-coloured wood around the sides instead of the shiny black you’d get on a normal telly. The screen could change so it went sort of matte instead of reflective, so it was like you were looking at a painting rather than a telly. Why, you might be asking, am I so enamoured by this stranger’s fancy new telly? Because I came up with this idea myself in 2009.

Having had a bit of a falling out with my boss in the sports shop (after turning up for every shift 10 minutes late for about three months solid), I decided, at the age of 18, that I was simply not cut out for a normal job.

What I wanted was to be my own boss, set my own hours and all that. How was I going to do this? With my new invention of course. A range of clip-on frames for tellies.

Imagine it right, you’ve got your telly on the wall but really it’s a bit of an eyesore. This big black void dominating your living room when it’s not on.

My solution to make this a bit easier on the eye was frames that just slipped over your telly, meaning you could match it to your wallpaper or general colour scheme. I hoped I’d figure out how to create a flexible mirror that could slide over your telly when it wasn’t on, making it just look like a mirror on the wall but when the telly was on it would slide away at the touch of a button so you could watch it. Alas, I didn’t have the technical skills to figure this out.

I became so gripped by this idea that it kept me up at night. I was convinced this was going to make a millionaire.

I had visions of myself as the ruler of a vast, interior design empire. I even seriously considered wearing polo necks all the time in the hope that it would channel the spirit of Steve Jobs and help me on my way. Thankfully, I did not do that. I enrolled on a college course designed for young entrepreneurs to try and get it off the ground.

I got as far as making a business plan, pitching for funding and even making a prototype (I paid over a hundred quid to get the prototype made and managed to send the place that was making it the wrong measurements, just one mistake I made from a long, long list.)

I started telling anyone that would listen about my idea to gauge their interest.

People seemed enthusiastic enough about it, all saying it was a good idea and something they hadn’t heard of before but thought it’d be magic.

Then one day, flicking through the new Argos catalogue, I came across a telly that came with three different coloured clip-on frames. I was incandescent with rage, furious that someone had beaten me to it. I ran through every person I’d told about the idea, convinced that someone had stolen the idea and somehow pitched it to a massive telly manufacturer.

I even began to suspect my own my maw. My brain was riddled with theories about how the idea was stolen from me. I thought maybe my computer was hacked or that someone else on the college course had stole the idea.

I thought at one point that maybe big companies kept tabs on people like me and that if I spoke up about it I’d get a knock at the door and two big burly guys in suits would batter me then tell me to keep quiet.

I was a paranoid wreck. I even thought maybe my boss at work had stole it to keep me in my place and teach me a lesson for being late all the time.

It’s now 10 years since this all happened and I have finally matured enough to realise the idea wasn’t stolen from me and that I certainly wasn’t the only person in the world to have come up something like it.

But there’s a still a part of me that thinks what if? What if I had somehow saw the idea through and started a business selling these frames for tellies? What if I had become a millionaire?

I have no doubt that if it had been a success and I had made a fortune at the age of 19 it would have rotted my brain and turned me into a nightmare of a man.

I am extremely glad now that it didn’t work out, (I say, writing about it 10 years later, the rage and fury all coming back to me) whoever got the idea into production before me did me a massive favour.