Jonathon has worked in seventy-two countries worldwide and thirty-eight states in the USA. He also travelled around the world in eight days for the Daily Telegraph and has visited the Geographic North Pole. Twice.
He has interviewed Kylie Minogue, Terry Pratchett, Marc Bolan, Darcey Bussell and the Saudi Minister of Finance, among others. He loves hearing about people’s life stories and works hard to find that certain something that makes everyone special.
As a Story Terrace writer, Jonathon provides professional ghostwriting services to capture customers’ life stories through carefully crafted anecdotes. Below is an anecdote of his own. Get in touch today to work with him!
Buy the Book, Buy the Book
My magazine was called GQ Active but I wasn’t. At forty-four my waist exactly matched my age. Age and waistline looked restricted in their future.
Enter Richard Smedley, ex paratrooper and trainer of stars, including Daniel Day Lewis, Julia Ormond and dozens of others. He undertook to train me for three months.
As I walked into Richard’s gym each week ‘James Bond’ actor Pierce Brosnan and I crossed and nodded sadly at each other. I began to wonder if the phrase ‘Make it look like an accident 007’ was being applied to me.
Forty minutes cycling twice a day and two-hours circuit training three days a week began to work. Each week showed significant weight loss. My wife and I marvelled as the scales showed less of me.
There were tasks. I rode a bike from Streatham to Brighton, swam a mile and rode back in the same day. I did a freefall parachute jump with the Army’s Red Devils and Go-Karted with the Royal Navy.
The SAS provided instructors to help me climb Pen y Fan at night. On the way to the climb we stopped at a motorway services. “Eat whatever you want” Richard said. The sheer glorious gluttony. Chip followed chip followed cake into a meal that contained more calories than my entire diet over the last three months. I was eating breakfast at ten pm not even caring if I was condemned. Suffice it to say that the calories were used.
Richard was a hard taskmaster. One morning I was on minute twenty of my forty-minute treadmill session. “Richard,” I said: “I’ve got really bad toothache.” “Tell you what mate. Stop running. I’ll buy you breakfast and drive you home, ok?” He stared at me. “I’ll carry on running?” He nodded grimly.
Three months later my waistline was thirty-four inches and I weighed roughly twenty-five kilos less. We wrote a book. We were interviewed by Mary Nightingale on London Weekend Television. “Tell us about the book,” she said. I thought about it: “Eat less, run more. The other 96,000 words are padding”.
They say that the longest journey begins with a single step. My first step was followed by several thousand more on a treadmill. Now I’m 62 and my waistline is 36 inches. ‘No More Mr Fat Guy’ sold 35,000 copies and not only saved my life but we still hear stories about people it helped.
