Araldite...

There isn’t a thing in the world that can’t be fixed with araldite.

When I was young if anything was broken or got dropped and smashed, out would come those two little tubes, that little bit of cardboard, and of course a matchstick, and soon whatever was broken was broken no more. Charlie’s glasses, my mum’s vase, the radio knob, my dad would even build it up slowly and then carve and file it to replace the missing piece of whatever it was that was broken.

In our house Araldite was the marvel of marvels, a panacea to cure all damage, a fix-it beyond compare.

I remember having my shoes fixed with Araldite, once when I snapped a button on my blazer that got the Araldite fix and the day I broke my arm I half expected my dad to give that the Araldite treatment too.

Araldite was invented in the forties and Araldite 420 was used for building Lancaster bombers in World War II. Today it’s used in pre-cast concrete unit bonding, advanced ballistic protection body armour, sticking tram parts together, gluing tiny parts in electron microscopes, and as carbon composites for the Audi R8. You name it araldite can stick it. Flamenco guitarists even use it to strengthen their fingernails.

I’ve used it to stick shattered doorframes back together, to stick the magnet to my fridge magnets (hand-painted and a bargain at £2.50), for fixing a broken clasp on a horse blanket, and to strengthen the zinc wire that holds my hall table lamp together after it took a nasty knock - the list just goes on and on.

But what to do with the little bit that’s left over after once you’ve stuck whatever you need to stick? I usually end up roaming the house looking for something broken – sometimes I’m sorely tempted to break something just so that I can araldite it back together again.

Maybe the next time someone break an arm I’ll get the Araldite out. Well, it's worth a try.