Primary school glue stick adventures

I probably wasn’t the goody-two-shoes kid in school, but I had a lot of kids pick on me too, so maybe it was fair.

Though I only really remember a couple of things I did that probably made me a bit of a naughty kid. Both things have to do with glue…

Glue sticks were annoying to carry, back in school. People often forgot their glue sticks and if the teachers weren’t mad, they would happily offer you a pot of this cheap, weird, porridge-like Clag glue which came in a pot where the lid had a brush attached to it, and you would dip it in the pot to get some glue. I think it’s called Clag paste now?

Because of the porridge-like texture, people thought you could eat these. Or they looked edible.

Based on that fact, all glue must be OK to eat, right?

One common brand of glue stick was DATS, a cheap two-dollar store brand. The glue was not very sticky at all and you had to really massage the glue stick onto a piece of paper before it actually got sticky. Otherwise, you could rub it on your hands or even pull bits off it without making a mess. It was kinda dry, and smelled like soap.

It lacked stickiness, but it was rather stretchy and malleable. I got bored one time and I rolled a piece of it into a ball in my hands.

Someone at school asked me what I was holding and I joked that it was a ball of candy, before revealing that it was in fact a ball of glue. Our class was seated in table groups at the time, and the seven other people at my desk wanted to touch this little ball of glue.

Soon enough, we had to use glue for an activity we were doing, and not everyone had a glue stick. One boy at my table asked to borrow mine, but before I retaliated, he said, ‘I will pay you ten cents’. Ten cents?! For a kid, that was like a fortune. I accepted the money and let him use my glue.

A little later on, one boy asked the same question but admitted he had no money and would pay me back the next day. I would not accept that though.

I said, ‘Only if you eat this.’

I held up the little ball of glue.

The other kids at my table were laughing and they egged him on to eat it, even though he kept saying he wasn’t going to. Eventually he did put it in his mouth and roll it around a bit before just swallowing it, opening his mouth and lifting his tongue to show us that he did indeed swallow it.

I think I was probably a hero to the other kids, because they thought it was really funny.