Worlds Biggest Whoopee Cushion

Fantastic, the latex arrives next day from FourDRubber and it's gorgeous, like a sheet of balloon skins.

The red colour is just like a traditional whoopee cushion which ties in with Guinness' requirements for the same materials to be used but we have gone for a heavier grade so that it doesn't split or burst when someone, or four people, sits on it.

I got some solvent adhesive to bond the rubber, after initially being tricked by the empty cans on the shelf in the hardware store (Kennedy's in Towcester) into thinking it was lighter than air.

Now to reverse engineer a genuine whoopee cushion to uncover the secrets of it's construction.

According to the rules of Guinness if you are going to make a large version of something it has to be of the same materials as the original. For instance, if you are making a giant car it has to work like a car and be made of car parts not just be a cardboard cut out - any fool could do that.

So for our giant whoopee cushion we had to source latex which produced some rather varied results when googled.

It wasn't long before we discovered FourDRubber who kindly sent us a sample pack full of different latex colours and thicknesses.

To their credit they didn't turn a hair when we described what we needed the stuff for. We suspect that giant whoopee cushions are one of the tamer uses for thier silky smooth sheets of natural rubber latex.

We tested the samples by folding them over, holding the edges and blowing into the gap near the fold to find out if they had the required resonnance. Most of them did and for a while we toyed with the idea of creating a whoopee cushion orchestra.

But this has already been done by us using Nuns.

It's been ten weeks since the application and not a dickie bird from the Guinness Book of Records Website.

Careful exploration of the site reveals that they are not keen on being contacted with Contacts pages constantly under development and no clear way of finding out what's going on.

I've tried various approaches but no help is forth coming. I feel sure they are pushing us in the direction of paying £250 to 'fast track' our application which is a kick in the teeth when we applied so long ago.

We have deadlines to meet. The sitting must take place by April 1st or what's the point?

Obviously it is everyone's dream to create something to be remembered by.

Most people just opt for having kids but that didn't appeal to us as we already have four, none of which are showing world record tendancies.

It had to be something really big, something that would create a buzz. The answer was staring us right in the face. Whoopee cushions. But not your common or garden whoopee cushion. Ours is going to be really, really different.

What the people of Britiain need is a great big massive whoopee cushion and we were going to be the ones to fulfill that need.

I remember the excitement in the office was tangable as we quickly realised that it had to be a Guinness World Record (the link with Guinness being obvious to those who drink the black stuff). So we applied at the Guinness World Record Website in November 2004.

It was meant to take 4-6 weeks to get a reply.

This is where our troubles began.