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 One of Siân’s diagrams offers tips on re-upholstering a chair |
It’s broken?
Give pieces a chance!
Siân Berry’s book laments society’s reluctance to take on basic household repairs and offers tips that could just mend the environment, writes
Dan Carrier
Mend It! By Siân Berry.
Kyle Cathie publishing £16.99
WHILE climate change creates doomsday headlines, the answer to all this may just be lurking at the bottom of the garden in a dusty shed, according to Green activist Siân Berry.
Siân, who lives in Kentish Town, is the author of a new book crammed full with practical tips on how to fix things. As well as saving you a fortune in call-out charges and stopping you consigning expensive electrical goods to the landfill because they don’t seem to be working, her guide has the twin aims of handing on practical tips that are fun to complete – and helping change our attitudes towards our disposable culture.
The idea for the book came from her grandfather Walter’s garden shed.
“He was an an engineer for ICI during the war,” reveals the Oxford University engineering graduate.
“He worked at a plant and he’d come up with ingenious ways of fixing things. They did not always have the materials they’d need because of the wartime shortages, but he’d find ways to keep the plant going.”
And it was his garden shed that amazed Siân as a young girl.
“He had every random part to every random piece of machinery stacked in there. He had hundreds of jam jars full of things,” she says. “He particularly inspired me not to be frightened to take the backs off things – it gave me an attitude that ‘hey, it’s broken anyway, let’s have a look inside’, and it made me confident in my ability to fix things.”
And Siân’s knowledge, laid bare in the book, is impressive: it ranges from simple advice on how to assemble a basic tool kit, through to such seemingly complicated jobs as fixing sash windows, repairing a radiator, replacing tiles and all manner of general plumbing and electrical jobs around the home.
All are presented as step-by-step guides, simple to follow and with plenty of gentle reminders that you will not blow your street up or demolish your home if you put a foot wrong.
But there is more to a DIY kit for dummies behind Siân’s reasoning – and it stems from her political philosophy. She stood against Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson in the London mayor elections for the Green Party, campaigns locally for the movement, and also had a spell as one of the Greens’ principal speakers – the party’s now-defunct version of shared leadership. She has also written other books on green lifestyles and felt this was the natural progression.
Siân believes the inability to change a fuse, which is a common factor behind the trashing of many household appliances, is a curse that people under the age of 40 suffer from. It is partly down to education, she believes.
“All over the world, children no longer learn manual skills at school,” she says. “Woodwork classes have been replaced by design and technology and shop classrooms in the USA are being ripped out in favour of computer labs. All very useful for a job in an office, but no so helpful when things go wrong around the home. This is a recent phenomenon: I am 35, my dad is 65 – he can do so many things round the home. He could make anything from stuff he found on a skip – something my generation just does not know how to do.”
It is also the curse of a rampant culture of companies constantly trying to sell new products – if a toaster is broken, why fix it when you can buy a shiny new one, we’re told.
“Toasters, irons and hairdryers are no longer mended but thrown away as soon as they go wrong,” Siân says. “In the UK alone people throw away 200 million electrical items every year.
“The tragedy is that most of these household items being sent to landfill dumps could have been used for much longer if we had the ability to fix the simple problems that cause them to break down.”
Siân cites the craze of ripping out wooden windows and replacing them with uPVC.
“Now we are seeing people return wooden windows to their homes,” she says. “They know that uPVC is horrible to look at and bad for the environment.”
Siân says she has done every one of the 400 easy repairs described in her book, and she is most proud of a sofa she re-upholstered which has pride of place in her sitting room. She spent £75 on material and it is as good as new.
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