Two dynasties, one guest list

01Lived

In the late 1980s I returned to the UK and founded what was then one of the very few personal training businesses in the country. I called it Fitness Express. My clients were high-powered and high net worth; we’re talking the Top 30 of the Sunday Times Rich List. Each year I threw the Fitness Express party, and one year I invited two families who, let’s just say, were not very close to each other. Think the Ewings and the Barneses from Dallas. I was friends with them both, and each would tell you their own version of the story of why things stood the way they did. Essentially, at that party, they came together. I don’t know whether anything practical ever came of it, any work or anything like that, but they actually came together. It was a bit of a softening.