It's a 'make do and mend' world - Brian Henderson

One of the surprise hits for the BBC in recent years has been The Repair Shop, in which a team of expert restorers do just what it says on the tin to family heirlooms, both valuable and sentimental.

Be inspired by Repair Shop experts like Dominic Chinea (Picture: BBC)

The experts have a host of skills which have been all but lost to a generation which has forgotten the joys of a “make-do and mend” culture.

At a deeper level, the environmental credentials of repairing goods rather than complying with the dubious ethos behind built-in obsolescence has also boosted the show’s popularity – and it has moved from an obscure time slot on BBC2 to a peak-viewing spot on BBC1.

Coincidentally, in recent months the EU has introduced legislation which gives consumers the legal “right to repair” for many of the goods they buy. And while the UK is no longer obliged to follow Europe’s lead, Westminster has confirmed that from the summer British consumers will have the same rights on goods they buy – and manufacturers will be legally obliged to make spare parts available for their products.

Still, whether or not there will be sufficient people with the skills to carry out these repairs remains a moot point – as will whether this can be done economically. For part of the throwaway culture has been driven by the fact that in many cases those who provide the raw materials and assemble consumer goods are paid poverty-line wages – while your local repair man can be forgiven for hoping to recoup at least the minimum wage for his craftsmanship and technical knowledge.

Recent global events have also highlighted the precarious nature of our reliance on cheap consumer goods from abroad.

And while the Covid pandemic led to a dramatic drop in the level of productive capacity around the globe, the blocking of the Suez Canal also highlighted just how easily supply chains can be disrupted.

Of course, farming has not been immune from these problems. And the tools we work with on a daily basis – tractors, implements and machinery, and the spares we need to keep them going – are all incredibly reliant on the “just in time” nature of supply, with few, if any, stocks of many key items being held in stores.

At the weekend one farming paper highlighted how machinery dealers were struggling to get their hands on new equipment at the moment – with huge waiting lists on everything from tractors to quad bikes.

And many of those who had signed up for the Scottish Government’s Sustainable Agriculture Capital Grant scheme have been finding their goods facing huge delays in delivery or almost impossible to come by.

Even worse, the sudden increase in the price of steel in recent months as the worldwide economy begins to reboot itself has also led to substantial price increases – with many of those who had ordered stock-handling equipment through the scheme faced with the prospect of paying much more for their kit or cancelling their order.

So our industry, too, might be forced to adopt more of a make-do and mend approach as the supply of shiny new equipment dries up.

And certainly in the past, friends and visitors from abroad have often commented on the amount of money which must be tied up in all the pristine machinery they see in fields and yards on British farms.

So, I might not be alone in having a growing collection of bits of machinery on the “healing bench” in the workshop at home, where non-urgent items are optimistically stored in the hope that they will miraculously repair themselves.

It’s not been a headline item in any of the climate change approaches so far, but it might not be a bad idea if carbon auditing systems took some account of just how long you get out of any piece of machinery before replacing it.

And maybe to meet future needs we should heed what my grandmother told my mother when she was first married: “If there’s ever anything you need, just come to me – and I’ll tell you how to do without it…”

The Repair Shop, Wednesday, BBC1, 8pm

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