Superglue and other stories

Oh, Dear Me. That was a disastrous decision to play in a chess tournaament this afternoon. P9 W2 D1 L6 but not costing too much on the ratings because I played against some fairly sharp know-how. But one learns to lose gracefully. Or try to think of consolations.

Like this week's successes with Superglue. I hope I'm not celebrating too soon.

First of all I noticed a power point had come out of the wall in the kitchen. The whole fabric of the house disintegrates sua sponte, of its own accord, over the years and has to be maintained. Unfortunately I'm not a practical man. I can, and might well, season sundry pieces of no consequence like this with subliminal or passing references to Ovid or Carol Ann Duffy but my modest roll of honour of poetry-related prizes far outweighs those I have for tradesmanship one or two to nil.

I gaze aghast at anything that needs fixing and calculate the possible outcomes of a) leaving it be, b) have a go myself and see or c) think about ringing up someone with the requisite expertise and then go back to a). But on this occasion I considered the option of Superglue and, to cut this part of a mundane story short, it worked very well.

But the way Superglue works reminded me somehow of Carol Ann Duffy's Mrs. Midas and how turning everything one touches into gold is more than one really wants of having a wish granted. Do you know about Superglue? It feeds no one; clear, viscous, undiscriminating. It doesn't know when to stop sticking everything to everything else. Fingers to the tube it comes in; things to other things one doesn't want them to be stuck to.

In the same way that Ms. Duffy's Midas finds himself in a nightmare world of useless, dead gold, I imagined the house eventually locked down, locked tight, by a virulent plague of very effective glue. But there's no point in using glue that doesn't work. I could see nearly 2000 books becoming merely ornamental, their pages stuck together and the books all stuck to each other and the shelves, a CD of Buxtehude stuck unplayable in the CD Player, my pens stuck to the backs of envelopes halfway through notes on Thom Gunn books or, less likely, a new poem trapped mid word. I could see my finger, this same old finger that has typed every word I've ever put into a computer, stuck on one letter, aaaaaaaa, like that.

What I don't understand, being very bad at science, is how such strong glue can ever get out of the tube since if it's that sticky it would surely stick to itself. They must put an enzyme or anti-coagulant in it because, as we have seen recently, science is clever enough if left to its own devices. But so far, so good. Being uncomprehending of how the world works threatens to turn one into a 'man of faith', believing in things for no good reason. God Forbid. See what I mean. But as far as we can we must trust one another or die before changing our minds and realizing that we must trust one another and die eventually anyway.

But from my accustomed supine reading position in the front room, the first thing always when looking away from the book is the curtain rail which has detaching itself from the ceiling ever since probably Beowulf. Chronically I have been up the steps to shove it back in, tried Blu-Tack, Uhu and swear words but lived with the situation until this morning when I looked at it again, thought of the other tube of Superglue and, well, if fingers are crossed for various horses pounding their way round a glorious part of Gloucestershire next week, they include the future of the curtain rail in their thoughts.

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One thing leads to another, though, doesn't it, in reading and all things arty. Classic FM have, or had, a programme based on 'if you like this, then you should try that'. Gramophone has a similar feature more ambitiously offering family trees of other works related to a central piece under consideration. They might help but I prefer to do it for myself.

I don't know if my first experience of it was realizing the debt D.H. Lawrence's novels owed to Hardy's before his 'influence' perhaps brought forth Stan Barstow and Alan Sillitoe. I was aware that Roger McGough might not have happened as he did without e.e. cummings. And Dubliners needed George Moore and Turgenev before Joyce's legacy led Beckett to a dead end down one way but William Trevor took it gently down a more sustainable route.

The network of links that I've followed up from the starting point of Thom Gunn has provided all kinds of interest, some of which became favourites in their own right- Fulke Greville, August Kleinzahler, Mina Loy. Not quite so much all of the others.  

But, such as it is, having been lent the letters between Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson some months ago, I've very much enjoyed some Vita novels on the back of them and now, coming towards the end of The Edwardians, I see an advert in the back for her friend, Violet Trefusis. These are not quite the outrageously privileged, self-indulgent equivalents of our contemporary Conservative leaders. By all means they were outrageously privileged and self-indulgent but they understood themselves better. I might not want to defend what I know about Virginia too far beyond her brilliant writing but Vita's been great and Violet might be, too, so might be next. It's a different world and that is one of the things reading can provide. Proper, good, worthwhile reading. I don't mean Science Fiction.