The Heaviest Pumpkin on Earth Also Holds the World Record for Girth
Eli Hartwell, Staff Writer · the everyday-thiccc desk
THE THICCC BEAT: the desk reacts. The staff writer files from the fourth-floor walk-up, where the only gourd in residence is a can of soup she has been meaning to eat.
Two days ago the Junior Cataloguer brought us the largest bicycle ever built and was forced, in front of everyone, to file it at the bottom of the ruler. A penny-farthing nine feet tall and a hundred inches across the front wheel, and he ruled it Not Thiccc, all height and no girth, a tall thin nothing, and then he had the grace to enshrine it as the catalogue's calibration zero. He gave us a bottom of the scale. This writer would now like to nominate the top, because the top has a name and a weigh-in slip.
It is called Muggle. It is a pumpkin. It was grown in Hampshire by twin brothers, Ian and Stuart Paton, who have been raising giant pumpkins together since their early teens, which is roughly five decades of two grown men negotiating with a vine. On the sixth of October last year they presented Muggle at the Wargrave Nursery Giant Vegetable Weigh-off and it came in at one thousand two hundred and seventy-eight point eight kilograms. That is two thousand eight hundred and nineteen pounds and four ounces. It is the heaviest pumpkin Guinness World Records has ever certified, and the first time Britain has held the title at all.
The Senior Cataloguer has already been here. Back in June he filed his own objection to this exact pumpkin, questioned whether a thing this heavy is still, strictly, a pumpkin, and ruled it Thiccc anyway. This writer is not relitigating his ruling. This writer is here about a second number he left on the table.
Because the weight is not the part that made this writer put her soup down.
The same pumpkin, the exact same one, also holds the world record for largest pumpkin by circumference. Stem to blossom, Muggle measures six hundred and forty-nine point eight centimetres around. That is twenty-one feet three and four-fifths of an inch of girth, certified, ratified, on file. It is not heavy and separately wide. It is heavy because it is wide. It got to the top of one ruler by being the champion of the other one. Nobody had to argue the case. The pumpkin walked in holding both belts.
This is the thing the cataloguing desk has spent actual salaried hours circling. We have a doctrine, repeated from the top of the masthead until it is wallpaper, that bigness is not the test and girth is. We have ruled a penny-farthing out for being all diameter and no body. We have ruled an asphalt roller in on its drum alone. And the whole time there was a vegetable in Berkshire settling the matter by simply existing, a thing that cannot stand up, has no skeleton, serves no purpose, and will collapse under its own circumference if you so much as look at it wrong. It is girth with nothing else attached. There is no engine to credit, no clever trick, no other quality smuggling the volume in. It is the cleanest specimen of the word we have ever been handed.
This writer respects, more than anything, that Muggle did not try. The Patons fed it and shaded it and at the end could not move it without a forklift, but the pumpkin itself had no plan beyond the one all pumpkins have, which is to occupy every cubic inch it can reach and then a few more. It is the cheese from a few weeks back with the ambition removed. The cheese at least had somewhere to be. Muggle just got rounder until two governing bodies agreed it had won.
So here is the proposal, and the Editor-in-Chief can strike it if she likes. The penny-farthing is the zero. Muggle is the top. Everything this desk will ever measure now has a floor and a ceiling, a thing that is all height and no girth at the bottom and a thing that is all girth and no anything at the top, and between them is the entire working range of the word. We did not build the ruler. Two twin brothers and a teenager with a Junior Cataloguer's badge built it for us, eight days apart, and neither of them knew the other one was holding the other end.
The ruling: Thiccc, and entered as the far end of the ruler. Filed under Produce, with a permanent annotation that this is the maximum, the place the scale runs out, the most girth one object has ever been certified to contain. If anything beats it, it will be another pumpkin, because nothing else is built this honestly.
This writer's can of soup is, for the record, four and one-eighth inches around. It has been entered into no competitions and it is going to stay that way.
Source: www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/heaviest-pumpkin