Sunday, October 14, 1990

The world record-holder is...

Ryan got the new Guinness book of records today for his birthday (thanks, Nic!). During the course of reading it, he happened to mention that the record for eating a raw onion is 1 min 29 sec. Paul loves raw onion and declared he could eat one quicker than that, no problems. Ryan was very excited by the possibility that someone in the family might end up famous (I still plan to beat the record of a 980-pancake stack one day) and encouraged him strongly to try. So, armed with a raw onion, a stopwatch and a bottle of water, Paul started. He ate gallantly, with much pacing and moaning and swigging of water. He finished, opened his mouth to show it was empty and checked the stopwatch. 1 min 25 sec!! How excited were we all. Ryan wanted to log onto the Guinness website straight away to register for the record, but Paul convinced him to wait a while longer to see how the onion settled, in case he was not game enough to repeat the feat another time. Despite everything for the rest of the day tasting like onion, and some pretty nasty belches, he emerged fairly unscathed. So if we can convince him, we might just have a genuine world-record holder in our midst one day...