IN A FIX
Is there anything more useless than a gumboot with a hole in it? There is not.
And this particular gumboot, one of my pair of famous-brand Wellies bought just 18 months ago, had one hell of a hole in it, a 20mm split on the heel.
Though there was life in them still, the split in the heel was a crack of doom, and my gumboots were bound for the landfill; goodbye old friends, but what a waste.
Or so it could have been. In a flash of inspired inventiveness, the solution appeared: I would put a bicycle repair patch over the split. Gumboots saved.
When I tell New York repair guru Sandra Goldmark this story she chuckles. This is exactly the sort of thing she has been doing for years: saving broken things from going to the tip.
For six years, she and a team of volunteers, including her husband, Michael, ran short-term, pop-up repair shops around New York. Like so many medieval, itinerant tinkers, they would set up in empty neighbourhood shops or at farmers’ markets, fix what was brought to them, if they could, then move on.
How does a theatre professor at Barnard, a private women’s liberal arts college in New York City, end up mending strangers’ old lamps and shower radios?
“Pure orneriness,” she tells the Listener, with a laugh. But it was much more than that. Those years of mending weren’t just about doggedly saving people’s stuff from landfill one broken lamp at a time, but were political acts, too.
In her new book Fixation: How To Have Stuff Without Breaking the Planet, Goldmark relates how her pop-up repair shops arose from an epiphany during sleep-deprived maternity leave.
“Dad would pull it apart, figure it out and fix it. It wasn’t about poverty, it
