Apropos of nothing, we're talking about glue. Not the drugs kind. Just glue for sticking stuff together. It turns out that the Plague Doctors have had some pretty harrowing glue incidents over the years. Here's some glue nostalgia.
BROTHER PAUL
On my first day of primary school, when I was three, I ate some white PVA glue. I don't remember why. I don't remember what the effects were, but I imagine I was sick.
The best thing about white PVA glue was the weird little spatulas you used to spread it on stuff. It was also fun to put it on your fingers and hands and play with it so it went tacky and you could peel it off and roll it into balls. Very satisfying.
When I was in Mrs Hickson's class we had moved on to using the glue gun. I loved the glue gun, especially the weird burning smell and the sense of danger. I managed to glue gun my hand once and ruined my best orange jogging bottoms in the process. I had to run my hand under the cold tap for about an hour and it was well boring.
In the second year at secondary school, I was playing football in the tennis courts in my brand new shoes and the stitching came off, leaving the front section flapping about and my foot getting wet. Not wanting to admit to my mum I had broken my new shoes, I bought some Bostik and glued them back together. This didn't work very well, so I had to buy a lot of Bostik. My mum then found all the tubes in my bedroom, arousing her suspicion.
Mum: Are you sniffing glue?
Me: No.
Amazingly this answer sufficed, as she didn't seem to care what I was actually using the glue for.
That was my last major glue incident. Over to John.
BROTHER JOHN
At the age of nine I was a pupil at a very nice little countryside school in Cumbria.
One day during some sort of crafts lesson one of my little friends was using the much revered glue gun to create a peg-gun (a gun that fires pegs). While waiting patiently to use the glue gun myself I noticed that my shoe lace was untied, bending down to tie it I put my head into the line of fire, resulting in a large unsightly white blob in my hair. Mother cut it out for me on return to the Kastle Inkredible.
My dad would occasionally refer to “The Knackers Yard” throughout my childhood. He would tell me with a big smile on his face how if next door’s horse didn’t get better soon then it would end up being made into the glue that I use to make airfix models. Thanks to wikipedia I can reliably tell you that horse glue is only used for pipe organs, antiques and stringed instruments nowadays. So you can get glueing those model planes without images of melting horses spoiling your enthusiasm.
