Thursday 22 May 2014

I Glue My Fingers

Last weekend, I knocked a blue and white pottery bowl from its place on my desk.  It broke cleanly into three pieces.


A little while later, I put the pieces onto some newspaper, squeezed superglue onto their unglazed brown edges and held them together to reform the bowl.  When I released my grip, it fell into four pieces.


Undeterred, I applied more glue to the porous surfaces to fix the newly broken piece together.  When I let it go, the break had not mended, but my index finger was stuck to my thumb.


My mother bought the bowl from the Aldermaston Pottery thirty-five years ago.  When I was a teenager in the 1980s, most people associated Aldermaston with the UK's nuclear weapons programme and CND's protests.  I associate its name with beautiful pottery.  My mother bought a few items at a time and over a period of about ten years she built up a dinner service complete with soup bowls, dinner plates, mugs, pudding bowls, serving dishes and a coffee pot.  We used it every day - it was too lovely to save for best.


Prised apart, my fingers felt as if they had been flattened and lost their prints.  I spent the rest of the day rubbing them together, trying to regain their identities.

2 comments:

  1. If you get superglue on your fingers,stick them in cold water immediately. The glue will quickly harden and cease to be sticky.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Poetry from pottery, Liz. Thanks. You've inspired me to have a go - or maybe to superglue some old poems together to make a new one.

    ReplyDelete