1.98m

He has used this power to break hundreds of records. He has pogoed in Antarctica, walked 130km with a milk bottle on his head, won a potato sack race against a yak in Mongolia, all to promote Sri Chinmoy to a wider audience. “I realised that I have this capacity. And it’s not just me,” he said. He echoed what Rush had told me: being g the best at something is not innate. It’s something that you decide to do.

I mentioned my pitiable attempt at the standing on one leg record. Furman’s eyes lit up. “You could do that one, you could … 32 minutes is not a long time. See, that’s a soft record,” he said, a grin breaking across his face, “that makes me think, wow, I could do that.”

Furman is one of the old guard who believes that the business of record breaking has become too much of a business. “Things have changed a lot with Guinness,” he said. “It was much more personal, back in the day. For years, when the book came out, I would go out to lunch with the editor, or the head of PR. I think we kind of lost that. I know Craig [Glenday], I think he’s a great guy, but really it’s become more of a big business. And I understand that. It’s the way the world has changed.”

These days Furman is more interested in helping others achieve record-breaking goals than in breaking records himself. To him, records are a measure of human progress.

Encouraged by his belief in my abilities, I spent weeks practising standing on one leg blindfolded. Initially, I was very bad. Then, soon enough, I wasn’t. I got up to 12 minutes and eight seconds before it occurred to me to check that the record had not been broken since I tried it at the Guinness office. It had. It now stood at 1hr 6min 57sec, broken in early 2022 by a man named Ram Phai in India. After reading this, I was demoralised, and I gave up. The reason I didn’t break the record was not because I was incapable of doing it. It was because I didn’t want it enough.

Or perhaps I didn’t want it for the right reasons. GWR may be a business, but for those pursuing records, it is far more than that. George Kaminski, who held the record for the largest collection of fourleaf clovers until 2007, collected them from the grounds of prisons in Pennsylvania where he was serving a life sentence. The woman with the longest fingernails, Diana Armstrong, does not have the longest fingernails because she wants her picture in a book. She has the longest fingernails because she decided never to cut them again after her daughter, with whom she used to get her nails done, died aged 16.

I asked everyone I spoke to whether they thought that keeping track of world records was important. “What is the definition of important? It’s what you or other people find important,” Rush said.

The events we celebrate in the Olympics were initially chosen to demonstrate some kind of martial prowess: throwing spears, running quickly, wrestling an opponent. We’ve added new categories: basketball, skateboarding. But most of the achievements we value, in the Olympics as elsewhere, are arbitrary. Guinness world records are a way of acknowledging the value of human endeavour of any kind: of celebrating achievement in the abstract.

I spoke to Glenday again late last year, a few months after meeting Furman. He’d had a frustrating week: an attempt at the highest bungee jump that ends with toast soldiers being dipped into boiled eggs had been scuppered by unusually high wind.

But he was not defeated. “Reading about things that you’ve never even conceived of, or can’t ever have imagined, is just thrilling,” he told me. “You get an adrenaline hit from that discovery, and we still get it now. I still get it when I see things that I’ve never seen. Like this year, we’ve got a dog and a cat on a scooter together.”

Not long ago, I logged on to Zoom to watch Ortolf, the young record breaker with a gift for eating very fast, attempt to break his next record: the shortest time to sort 500g of peanut M&Ms by colour, using only one hand. The holder of the title, a man in Perth, had achieved this in 1min 33.03sec. Ortolf, at his house outside Munich, had seven bowls of equal height laid out in front of him and a camera set up on a tripod. He opened the bag of M&Ms, emptied them into one of the bowls and showed the now-empty bag to the camera, to me, and to his other witness, a friend.

He sat down and placed his left hand behind his back, and his right hand flat on the table. He took a few breaths. The timer started, and he began. He had a technique: blue first, as he finds them easiest to spot.

The only sound was Ortolf’s measured breathing, and the rhythmic ding of blue chocolate hitting ceramic. Then brown, green, yellow, orange. The final colour he could do in scoops. As the last handful hit the bowl, his witness stopped the clock. One minute, 27.45 seconds. Another record in the bag, his 104th.

Ortolf laughed, a smile splitting his face. “Yes,” he said, “yes.”

‘The belief that you can get better at something dramatically improves your ability to do so’