Get peeling!

This could be an activity to do with any youngsters - or oldsters - in the family, especially as it's only a couple of months until National Apple Pie Day, on April 13, and you'll need to get some practice in.

Hard core! Apple peeling champion slices through competition to produce nearly four-metre strip of skin.

Four metres is about 13 feet!!

Let the challenge begin!

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It's Queensland, Australia, and outside a marquee, across from the clock tower, a crowd is gathering for the Stanthorpe apple and grape harvest festival’s apple peeling contest. Well, contest might be an exaggeration.

Kerrie Stratford, 65, is the undisputed champion of apple peeling. There is no competition. She has won 21 titles at the Queensland town’s biannual festival, claiming a shelf full of trophies including one tasteful prize that is a rock with a peeler on top of it.

It doesn’t stop a table of 10 competitors from trying though. Yet no one will admit to secretly practising at home. Nonchalance is apparently the only acceptable attitude towards competitive apple peeling.

Especially Stratford. “No, no, no,” she says. “I’m just relaxed,” she adds, without really looking it.

This morning she will attempt to break her own record. The pressure is on. The peelers are on the table. The apples are ready. Fingers are being flexed.

The first contest is the fastest to peel an apple. Stratford has held this record, too. “I held the fastest and longest, both titles, for quite a while,” she says. “But as I’ve gotten older my speed isn’t there any more. Arthritis is coming in.”

Russell Wantling, the festival’s president, decides he has to stand up to employ the full force of the peeler. A cookery writer, Kim McCosker, wins; she is there to judge the “prestigious” apple pie competition later in the morning.

There is a tremor and a shake as Stratford clutches the peeler for the second contest, the longest peel. And they’re off. A flurry of action. They have 10 minutes; the countdown begins. This is clearly an art. Stratford is not just peeling thin lines of skin, she is taking part of the flesh so the peel won’t break.

Around the table there are cries of disappointment as other peels break. Stratford seems to be going agonisingly slowly. With seven minutes to go she is still near the top of her apple. This comes down to the millimetre, to the second. Oh, the suspense. Time seems to expand and slow down.

“My fingers are cramping bad,” she says through gritted teeth. Down to the count and she has miraculously reached the bottom of the apple.

Out comes the tape measure. Stratford has not broken her 2018 record of 6.1m. (20 feet!) Today the peel is a mere 3.9m (nearly 13ft).

(The full story is at the link, above.)