One of the things we, in the west, can learn from the Chinese is the willingness to make-do and mend our appliances. Once in a while several fixers come with their tables and tools and sit on the pavement outside my community. My neighours bring out their broken objects and for a small fee they kep their apllicances going for a few more years.
Along the street there are the two local tailors who will patch my jeans, take up hems, replace a zip and carry out all manner of garment corrections you can’t/don’t want to do yourself. They charge around £3 for most repairs and, certainly for me, it saves buying another pair of jeans. I can keep my old faithfuls going for a lot longer.
When I saw the repair men this week I was wracking my brain to think of something I had which was broken and could bring them but I didnt have anything. Sadly I recently chucked out two cheap Ikea lamps which had stopped working. I was sorry I had not kept them and got them fixed. Ikea stuff is so cheap it feels ok to chuck it out.
But it’s not all about saving money, with all the recent press coverage about plastic pollution, it now feels immoral to throw away rather than fix things.
My grandparents’ generation would always fix machines instead of throwing them out – it was part of the make-do and mend lifestyle around the time of the second world war when things were in short supply.
I know there are menders in the UK but certainly, the garment alterations I have used, have been prohibitively expensive. What we need is cheap repairs and only then, will people be more inclined to make-do and mend again.