WILLIAM WORTHERSPOOL 'S ADVICE
Aunt Maude's legacy
Nephew Wilde LAST Tuesday was a gloomy day. I woke with a deplorable sense of guilt that only increased from the moment I dressed in my darkest suit to the time I arrived at Aunt Maude's funeral. She was a fine old lady, full of Anglo-Irish idiosyncrasies. I recalled the time she landed in Dover on a scorching hot day clad in two fur coats; she firmly believed she wouldn't have to pay customs duty on anything she wore. Then there was the time she clouted a policeman on the head with her umbrella because he " molested " her by taking her arm as she stood in the middle of Oxford Street protesting against an increase in the cost of dog licences Now she was dead, God rest her soul. Miserable I had not visited her as she contemplated the pros and cons of burial or cremation. So we laid her to rest beneath a fitting epitaph taken from some irrelevant ballad by Oscar Wilde.
There followed a word with her solicitors and I gathered that a princely fortune was coming my way. How could I take money from someone I had so Callously neglected in her final hours?
This depression, led me to seek the wretched comfort of a drink and that's when I met Wotherspool. William Wotherspool and I had been to the same school and then we both read law at Trinity College, Dublin. I always avoided him like the plague. Money, money, and more money was his sole obsession in life. Once, in an attempt to rid the world of this odious man, I bet him a fiver he couldn't swim the River Liffey (in January). Of course he did. He hardly shivered as he made me write out an IOU.
Now here he was again. A junior partner
in a stockbroking firm. I must admit he was rather more amenable this time, especially when he heard I was running into money. So I accepted his invitation to lunch a very boozy affair, as it turned out, in the City. And before he paid the bill (muttering something about expenses) we had decided he would handle the investment of £10.000 from my Aunt Maude's legacy.
Wotherspool's plan is to see me provided with some income from these investments, with an eye to capital appreciation. I don't work, so the former should help to prevent me from inflating the unemployment figures while the latter, I hope, will keep me in cartridges and golf balls and perhaps provide me with the wherewithal to see the Mediterranean sun each year.
With this object in mind Wotherspool has allocated £1,000 from my funds for an investment in Booker, McConnell. He has bought just over 500 shares at I90p. They yield 3.4 per cent which I am told is above average and the growth prospects are excellent. Wotherspool has read reports that Booker is looking for an annual growth rate over the next five years of fifteen per cent per annum. Booker, he tells me, is basically a food group, with sugar interests in Guyana, but recently has expanded its UK operations to a considerable extent. This, Wotherspool says, "is a good mixer" for my portfolio and, from a quick and casual look at Booker myself, I am prepared to agree. Meanwhile, at Wotherspool's suggestion, the other £9,000 is going safely into a building society, but at ready call for me to add to my portfolio, week by week, upon the promptings of my instincts, or at Wotherspool's advice.
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