It was our regular half yearly visit to Lemonia in Primrose Hill, a family run Greek Cypriot restaurant: it’s Nick’s favourite, he celebrates everything with lunch at Lemonia. Last year was his 65th birthday; to commemorate I gave him a gold watch for his retirement. It was symbolic really as Nick hasn’t worked since breaking his neck some twenty years ago.

The unsung hero is the accountant who pushed Nick into making substantial pension contributions when he was working. The accountant has long since retired so for the past few years I have been advising Nick about his pension. I became involved following the collapse of the dotcom boom; with retirement looming large Nick was worried, and so was I.

His pension was invested in the With Profits fund, a misnomer if ever there was because despite the preceding dotcom boom the fund had hardly grown. Things didn’t look good for the With Profits fund so I set about restructuring his portfolio to provide some diversity. I wanted to capture growth but also introduce some security.

A reasonable chunk of the fund went into shares and property, and the fund grew significantly from 2003 onwards. But with retirement looming, and an eye on the bubble that was beginning to form, we gradually took profits and moved more into cash and government bonds. Nick said I was being too cautious; after the euphoria of annual double digit growth the investments looked boring.  “Don’t be greedy Nick” I said, “the fund is now large enough to give you the income you want, let’s not push our luck”.

Back to the Lemonia, we were well into our second bottle of wine, and Nick was looking back at the decisions we had taken. “Do you know” said Nick, “I think boring is the new exciting – Cheers!”

The audience were generally wrapped up well, and we had been fortified with a glass or two of red wine to help take the chill off – very thoughtful. And so the evening commenced with an eclectic mix of violin and piano pieces, including a world premier of a recent composition by a contemporary Japanese composer.

Finally after an hour or so the music ended and the real purpose of the evening unfolded - sponsorship of the forthcoming (sixth) Little Venice Music Festival in September. I suppose I had an inkling there would be a call for financial help, after all until quite recently Virginia and I had been neighbours (Virginia is one of the key organisers of the concert), so I knew they were always looking for some financial assistance.

So after an enjoyable evening we were being asked to dig deep into our pockets. The amount of money needed wasn’t a huge amount, but their appeals were largely falling on deaf ears, and so we stepped in as the principle sponsor to support the event.

Looking back I’m not entirely sure why, it must have been the wine! Besides I don’t even live in Little Venice these days. However, music is something to be enjoyed and there is little enough community spirit and involvement – or so were told. The Little Venice Music Festival seems to tick so many boxes - and surplus proceeds would go to the nearby St Mary’s Hospital – it seemed harder not to help!

Of course, being the principle sponsor does come with some priviledges, including a number of tickets to each performance. We will be offered these to our clients as soon as we have the final details. In the meantime, anyone wanting to learn more about this year’s festival should visit the Little Venice Music Festival website.