Live from Tregony! An Interview on BBC Radio Cornwall

I was happy to be asked onto Julie Skentelberry’s morning show on BBC Radio Cornwall this morning. Thanks to Dick Straughan for helping to set this up, Matt the engineer, and Julie for being fun despite having to scoot off for an emergency dental appointment.

We’re still looking for volunteers. Are you interested? Get in touch!

You can listen to the interview here (begins at 11:30 am, which is 1 hour 30 mins into the programme). For those with accessibility requirements, or just prefer to read, here’s a transcript.

• Julie: Let’s talk now about fixing stuff. I have to say, you know, since I’ve been a widow, that’s the one thing I miss is having somebody in my life who is good at fixing stuff. Perhaps I should learn, and perhaps this is the place. If your zip’s gone in your coat, your toaster has seen better days, and your favourite chair’s getting a bit kind of wobbly, don’t throw it away because you can bring it to the Tregony Repair Cafe, and they’ll see what they can do. Their inaugural cafe is happening on the 24th of February, so next month at Tregony Village Hall, we’ll give full details in a moment, but I want to have a chat now with Ian. Ian Hocking, who is the director of the Tregony Repair Cafe. Hello, Ian.

• Ian: Hello, Julie. How are you doing?

• Julie: I’m delighted to speak to you, a man who can fix things up, my hero. So talk to me about why you decided to set this up in Tregony.

• Ian: Well, this is, it’s literally really a community kind of enterprise really. So I’m recently down in Tregony. I was living in Canterbury up until six months ago. I’ve returned to Cornwall, having grown up in Cornwall, I grew up in Sticker, and to this combines just bringing the community together but also I’m very interested in sustainability and basically getting the maximum out of all of the bits of kit that we have lying around and the things that need fixing. So it’s all about basically trying to extend how long we can use things like zips, clothing, knives, sharpening knives, IT stuff, jewellery, all of that kind of stuff basically. So it’s all about… it’s a very kind of local thing. It’s really something that, because I’ve been to the Repair Cafes but other places in Canterbury and in Cornwall and I literally just asked around would people be interested in Tregony to have a Repair Café, and everyone said yes. So here we are. We’re doing this.

• Julie: What sort of skill set have you? It’s been like Avengers assemble repairers. How have you found people with different areas of expertise?

• Ian: So basically, we put the call out for volunteer repairers, and we’re still doing that now, so if people do want to volunteer as a repairer, you don’t need to be completely expert in these things. You just need to have an interest. You can go to our website. I can give you the details in a moment, but we basically, we’ve asked people, are you able to help with things like repairing laptops, electronic stuff, can you fix a broken chair, and lots of people have said yes, I can do that, and then we asked them, do you need tools for that? Have you got your own tools? We’re very much kind of playing it by ear. We don’t know what the situation will be like on the day, how many people turn up. Hopefully, lots of people will turn up, but basically, each Repair Café, and it’s running monthly, the last Saturday of each month, each one will have different repairers there really, so it will be a different mix kind of each time.

• Julie: Okay, so you’ll sort of have maybe a specialist who’s sort of an IT person one week and then maybe you have a woodworker, maybe somebody who does electrics the kind of week after, which is a really good idea, and a lot of stuff. I mean, obviously, you know, chairs shouldn’t be a problem, but a lot of gadgetry that you buy just seems to be designed not to be fixable, but there has been a change in the law, hasn’t there, to say that spare parts should be available?

• Ian: Yeah, I mean, it’s really a shame, it’s one of the things that makes modern life so great is the fact that our technology, particularly related to computers, are becoming more miniaturised, they’re smaller, they’re lighter, but as you get this more miniaturised kind of technology, it’s just harder to repair them, so for instance, I’m a software developer, I write software for Apple computers. Apple computers are great, but they’re full of glue, you know, I’ve got these earpods that stick in my ears, or AirPods, I should say, they’re great, they’re very, very difficult to repair because they’ve got glue and stuff in them, so it’s really fantastic that we’re now moving towards a situation where we’re basically looking to have things that are more repairable, and companies are being pressured not just by the government’s legislation but also by people, they want, you know, you don’t want to throw away a computer or any other thing like that after a few years simply because one of the components is broken, what you want to be able to do is to target that component, so you’ve got laptops, for instance, being made by companies like Framework, a Framework laptop is an essentially modular laptop, you can swap pieces in and out, you can swap the keyboard, you can swap the monitor, the built-in display, all of those kind of things, so we’re definitely seeing a move towards these kind of, you know, things that basically be more repairable, and the repair cafe network, if you like, is all part of that.

• Julie: Is there an ambition as well to help people learn to fix stuff themselves alongside getting somebody who’s good at it to do it?

• Ian: Yes, absolutely, that would be what we don’t want is for people to turn up and dump their stuff and disappear and come back for it to be fixed. Ideally, we want people to learn and to sit with the experts, some experts will work this way, and others will prefer to work on their own, but ideally, we want people to come up and say, I’ve got this broken thing, it might be, I don’t know, let’s say it’s the zip on your coat, it’d be fantastic if that person could sit down next to the expert, and the expert say, well, look what I’m doing, it’s actually really simple, I’ve got this machine here, I’ve got the sewing machine, we’ve got, you know, there’s a couple of tips I’ll give you, you know, and let’s fix it, and maybe next time, that person can fix their own zip, or they can go and fix other ones, and that will apply to zips, it might apply to jewellery, it might apply to fixing wooden objects like chairs, so ideally, what we’re trying to do is to kind of spread the learning rather than simply provide a service, but also, we’d be providing that service as well.

• Julie: It sounds wonderful, as somebody who is the widow of the ultimate practical man who was very good at fixing anything as long as it wasn’t digital, I have now discovered that my, my widow’s go-to is, if I don’t can’t get it to work, spray it with WD-40, but you’ll be glad to know, you’ll be glad to know I haven’t used that on a computer yet, because I think that would be wrong.

• Ian: Yeah, it’s not recommended. We will have WD-40 at the repair cafe, don’t worry, plenty of that.

• Julie: Yes, it is my new lasting relationship is with it in a WD-40. So if people want to come, the first one is the 24th of February at one o’clock at the village hall in Tregony, isn’t it?

• Ian: That’s it, yeah. We’ve got lots of parking available. You can go to our website, which is www.Tregonyrepaircafe.org. And I just want to just shout out to the larger Cornwall Repair Cafe network, which has been set up by the council. We’re part of that. If people locally fancy setting up a repair cafe, which they can do for virtually no money, it’s very easy to do. We just need people. Go out and check out the Cornwall Council’s repair cafe network for more information.

• Julie: Brilliant. That is fantastic. I hope you fix many things and make a lot of people very happy.

• Ian: Me too, on both counts.

• Julie: If you need a woman who’s good with a tin of WD-40, just shout. I’ll be there.

• Ian: Okay, we’ve got your number.

• Julie: Take care. Very nice to talk to you, and thank you.

• Ian: Yes, you too. Bye-bye.

• Julie: Bye-bye. Ian Hocking now the director of the Tregony Repair Cafe. I just love that idea. I hope it really really takes off.