Road to wealth is paved with good inventions for young entrepreneurs

THEY came into the big room, some of them dry-mouthed with terror, some of them sunny with positive expectations.

A few came in on their own, others brought colleagues. Two wore the livery of the new company they planned to establish, three sported Ribena-coloured hair, which turned out to be a leftover from a charity unrelated to their company, and one of them looked, for a bizarre split second, as if she was the custodian of a stiff but light corpse she was carrying by the legs.

The light stiff corpse turned out to be a department store mannequin, who got screwed into the ground by one leg, leaving the other extended. Clare Murphy, who either owned or had borrowed the mannequin, slid what looked like a broad black garter over the foot of the free leg, ran it to thigh level, then patted the mannequin’s short skirt down over what she announced as The Leggit.