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More than a mended toaster

On the first Saturday of every month, the parish hall in Ashby Quay smells of solder, tea and warm dust. Tables are pushed together under the strip lights, and at each one a volunteer is bent over somebody else's broken possession: a toaster that no longer pops, a lamp with a flickering temper, a cardigan whose elbow has finally surrendered. Nobody pays for the work, though a jar by the door collects coins for the kettle fund.

The idea behind such gatherings, usually known as repair cafés, began in the Netherlands in the late 2000s and has since been taken up in many countries. The format varies little. Visitors bring something that has stopped working; a volunteer, who may be a retired engineer, a seamstress or merely a stubborn amateur, examines it alongside the owner; and, whenever possible, the two of them mend it together. The insistence on "together" is deliberate. Organisers say they have no wish to run a free repair shop, which would invite people to treat the volunteers as a service rather than as neighbours.

Kiran Doshi, who spent thirty years as an electrician and now runs the Ashby Quay table, is unsentimental about the results. "About two in three things leave working," he says, a ratio that, he concedes, depends heavily on what is brought through the door. Simple faults, such as a loose wire or a worn belt, are quickly dealt with. Devices sealed with glue or unusual screws are another matter, and he is wary of promising anything about them. "We can often find out what's wrong," he says. "Whether anyone is allowed to put it right is a different question."

Environmental arguments are usually the first offered in favour of the movement, and they are not unreasonable: manufacturing a new appliance consumes materials and energy, so every year added to the life of an existing one is, in principle, a small saving. Yet the volunteers I spoke to were curiously reluctant to rest their case on this. Few could say with confidence how much waste their town had avoided, and several suspected that the figure, if anyone calculated it, would be modest. What they spoke about, with far greater animation, was something harder to measure.

"People arrive apologising," said Gwen Okafor, who mends clothes. "They say they're hopeless, that they've never been able to do anything with their hands. By the end of the afternoon they're holding the needle themselves." Some researchers who study such events suggest something similar: the sense of competence that a successful repair brings can outlast the repair itself, and, perhaps more surprisingly, the conversations that happen over the workbench often matter as much as the object on it. In a town where, by general admission, neighbours have grown used to nodding rather than talking, this counts for a good deal.

Not everything can be rescued, of course, and the hall's back table is piled with the casualties: a radio beyond saving, a vacuum cleaner whose motor has given out. But the owners of these, too, tend to leave in decent spirits, having at least understood what went wrong. It is a small consolation, perhaps, yet in an economy that encourages us to regard our possessions as disposable and our ignorance of them as normal, it is hardly a trivial one.