Here’s a question for you. Who holds the record for the world’s most pointless world record? There must be hundreds of candidates. I remember someone doing laps of TV Centre carrying a flat-sided brick once. That was probably the beginning of the end for Record Breakers.
In January this year, a bunch of people in Argentina made their own bid for unprecedented mediocrity by smashing the world floating record. That’s right, there is a world floating record. (By the way, if you look up ‘floating world records’, it’ll take you to, er, Floating World Records, a very esoteric record company in North London, which specialises in obscure 70s oddness by the likes of Rick Wakeman, Captain Beefheart and Arthur Brown. I should warn you that you might find that preferable to what I’m about to impart.)
Now, before I reveal the magnitude of their achievement, what do you imagine the world floating record might entail? It has to be some sort of stamina record, right? Someone floating on the Serpentine for 18 days while their mum brings them their meals in a small rowing boat perhaps? Or maybe a group of Norwegians lathering themselves in goose grease and floating on the Gulf Stream from Cancún to Stavanger while being nibbled by sharks.
No?
The world floating record, I can reveal, consisted of 1,941 people joining hands and floating on Lake Epicuen in Argentina for – get this – 30 seconds! That’s right, 30 whole seconds. That’s half a minute in the old money. Here’s a video of it if you’re stuck for something to pass the time.
Two things stand out from this: firstly, that number, 1,941, is ridiculous. Surely, if you’re going to go to the trouble of gathering 1,941 people together at a lake in Argentina, why not go the extra mile and rope in another 59 to make it a nice round 2,000? Secondly, this feat should enter the dictionary as the literal definition of underwhelming, as anybody who read my post on the word whelm will concur. If whelming is the act of swamping in water, then underwhelming has to be the equivalent of floating, right?
And it doesn’t get much more underwhelming than this. The only merit in their… (‘achievement’ is too strong a word) is that it wasn’t as dismal as the previous record, set by a mere 650 floaters in Taiwan.
Apart from their accidental contribution to linguistics, the performance of the 1,941 is staggeringly unimpressive. Floating for 30 seconds by any number of people is easy, especially on a lake like Epicuen that has a very high salt content so it pretty much does the work for you. I reckon I, like millions of other six-year-olds, surpassed that feat when I did my ASA Bronze Swimming Award. Where were Norris and Ross McWherter then?
Adding more people doesn’t make a simple feat any harder. It’s like breaking the world record for having a bath by getting 1,941 people to have a bath. In fact, that would be more impressive, since baths are a good deal smaller than Lake Epicuen.
In researching the world floating record and hoping to come across something more remarkable than a bunch of Argies having a dip, I happened upon another South American held ‘world record’, which might just eclipse the Lake Epicuen 1,941 for feebleness. Hoping for something more akin to Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947, when he and his chums floated 4,300 miles on a raft from Peru to the South Sea Islands, thus proving his theory that people could have migrated from South America to Polynesia (and setting the technology of boat building back 2,000 years in the process), I typed in ‘world’s longest raft race’ and was taken to a small independent record label in Harrogate.
Not really.
I discovered something much worse. The world’s longest raft race takes place on the Amazon river in Brazil. So far so good. That’s a decent sized river. The race runs from Nueva Esperanza to the Gaza y Pesca Club in Bellavista. Hmm, the Gaza y Pesca Club, eh? Beginning to sense disappointment. And here it comes. Total distance: 112 miles.
112 miles!
The Amazon is over 4,000 miles long – almost exactly as long as Thor Heyerdahl’s rafting expedition, by coincidence. These intrepid rafters manage to conquer less than three per cent of it. There are ducks on the River Ouse who do better than that just by floating downstream from Ripon to Grimsby.
All of which is nothing more than a preamble, really, to a new discovery I made today called ‘bath float’.
Bath float.
There are many meanings of the word float: the effortless movement of a duck or a balloon; the buggy your milk used to be delivered in or the flat-bed truck carrying a carnival display; the bit of fishing tackle that tells you when you’ve got a bite; the lump of polystyrene you hold onto when you’re doing your ASA Bronze Swimming Award; the tin of money you start out with at a fair; to offer your company shares for public purchase; to drift a football into the penalty box; to put forward an idea…
They all derive from the Old English verb ‘flotian’, from which we also get fleet.
But bath float? Whatever happened to bubble bath? It appears to be the same thing. Ah well, now I’ve discovered it, maybe it’ll help me in my attempt on the world floating in a bath record. Anyone want to join me?
