Did I really break the world record for eating a pie? According to my mom, I had, and that made me special in her eyes, reminisces Darrel Bristow-Bovey.
“The problem with you,” I told my partner, “is that you don’t have enough faith in my abilities.”
“No,” said my partner patiently. “I am perfectly prepared to believe that you’re a glutton. I just don’t think you held the world record.”
“Well I did,” I said. “If you don’t believe me, you can ask my Mom.”
I tried to maintain my air of world-beating confidence, but I must say, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if it was true. It couldn’t have been a dream, could it? Did I really, when I was 10 years old, break the Guinness World Record for eating a pie?
It may seem unlikely, but I have a very clear memory of it: one day my mother brought back a quantity of chicken and mushroom pies from the tuck shop at the school where she taught, and lined them up in the kitchen, and stood there timing me with a stopwatch.
There were a number of pie records an aspiring champion could tackle. There was the stamina record, where you eat as many pies as you can in an hour, but I was too canny to try that. My 10-year-old belly was not as athletically developed as it is now – I would have been defeated by sheer volume. But speed and enthusiasm – there I had a shot.
The current world record for eating a standard-sized pie is 23,5 seconds, set by a professional pie-chomper named Martin Appleton-Clare in Wigan in 2012, so allowing for improvements in technology and training methods in the intervening decades, I am going to assume the record back then was a more manageable time of somewhere around a minute.
The first time I tried, I fell short of the mark, but my mother encouraged me not to be crestfallen. No one succeeds at the first go, she said, cleaning pie pastry and gravy from the floor, from the front of my T-shirt, from my face and hair. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
I took a short breather, then applied myself to the second pie. You’re getting closer, she said. Definitely closer! I was tempted to give up. If something didn’t come easy, was it worth anything at all? Also, I was quite full. Two pies in a row is quite a lot of pie. But my mom persuaded me that something means more when you’ve worked for it. Then it becomes something to be proud of.
I’d never thought of it that way. I’d spent my days studying a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records I’d received for Christmas, trying to decide which record to try to break, not sure where my natural talents lay. I desperately wanted to be good at something, but, as I had so far discovered, I wasn’t naturally very good at anything.
So I didn’t give up, and it’s strange – the third time felt like my slowest effort yet, but I still remember my mom’s look of excitement when she told me I’d done it! I’d broken the record! I’d worked hard and I’d done it! She was so proud of me!
It never became official, of course. You need special timekeepers and verification for that, but all through my childhood, I knew I was good at something. I knew that if I tried hard enough, I could be special. I told my partner all this, and she was quiet for a while, and then she apologised for having doubted me. It’s true, she said. I am special.
“And so is your mom,” she said.