Superglue that works

Sound familiar? Let me tell you, it's the voice of bitter experience. Not that I could ever be wrong or use stuff the wrong way - not me. Though I fully admit I'm capable of being super-clumsy when it comes to dexterity. It's just that even when I buy the most expensive stuff I can find, with a brand-name you could trust all the way back to Queen Victoria's second butler, it always goes horribly, awfully wrong.

So when I was stooging round the Boat Show the other day, I was not going to answer a voice that asked me if I had ever used superglue, and certainly not when it came from the smallest stand in the whole place - even the drinks vending machines were bigger.

This is the stuff - HAFIXS Industrial Glue. Near as I can tell it sticks anything to anything boom, with no messing around or 'ow's yer father

The problem was that it was already serious - and I couldn't get round her into the constant stream of show-stand staff pushing through for their chicken caesar wraps one way against the throng of leathered old salts coming the other in search of meat and two veg with some good hard stuff to go with it.

Had I ever used superglue the voice asked again. Trapped in an eddy around Mildred with nowhere to go, I turned to see who it was. Sigh, yes I had - and it was always a disaster. Hemmed in by the crowd, I resigned myself to the inevitable sales patter.

He was good and smooth, I'll give him that. I suppose if you run the smallest stand in the Show you have to be. And he certainly caught my interest when he concurred that most superglue encounters were similar to mine - in the simplest of terms, a complete disaster. He had me nodding too with the whole palaver about mixing two opaque substances into a gungy mess on a piece of newspaper that chased itself around the table-top until it stuck to something it shouldn't.

Then he produced THE GOO - a single bottle of clear liquid - HAFIXS Industrial Glue. Yeah right, with a name like that, it was made by Rumplestiltskin. Except, stack me, the stuff actually worked.

Right in front of my eyes, the bloke cut through a rubber drive belt for a pump or something, then put a bead of THE GOO on one. He touched he two together for maybe ten seconds and then invited me to pull them apart. Circus dummy me, yeah? Taken in by sleight of hand. OK, so why couldn't I pull them apart? Nah, it had to be one he made earlier.

An emergency kit to keep aboard - it lets you fix just about anything - even glue torn sails

Yeah, yeah, there had to be a trick - and now I wanted to play. So we stuck other stuff he had cluttering up his stand. Metal bolts to metal bolts, with a bit of jiggery-pokery first for about twenty seconds, lining them up with each other. Press them firmly and hey, they were stuck. No way I could get them apart with anything less than a cold chisel.

It was the same with plastic, ceramics, canvas and glass. In fact the glass was impressive because the stuff spread clear without blotches, transparent between two sheets that resolutely would not come apart. It was easy, it was simple and stuff that I could use.

So what was the downside? Because if I kept some of this aboard for emergencies, I'd be able to jury-rig pretty well anything that went wrong or broke on a cruise - I've done it before, you see - gone out there hoping for a good time on the water and something goes SPROING! when you least expect it. And how the heck do you fix it when it you've got to use it to get back, it needs specialist tools, or you've got to buy a replacement doohickey to make anything work?

OK I was taken in by the patter, so I bought some - ten quid for a 20 gram bottle. Know something? I'm mighty glad I did, because now whatever happens I can usually finagle something to fix whatever goes wrong, even if I get caught with the wrong tools. Oh yeah, and now that I've lived with it for while, let me tell you it cures even harder and more solid than when you first use it. Ten hours later and there's no way anything's going to part short of breaking it again. Plus it resists grease or water and works in the warm or cold (you keep it in the fridge so you can use it over and over).

Go on-line and you can see it comes with a whole slew of support stuff too. You can get a whole emergency kit to extend its uses - with filler, remover, accelerator, primer, cleaner - the works. I've never seen it in any shop, so I'd better give you the website: www.hafixs.co.uk