ending used to be a daily chore, like washing up. Every house had a darning mushroom, a tin of buttons and someone who knew how to use them.
We gave up mending when mending stopped making sense on paper. A new pair of socks costs less than an hour of your time. The sums are right; they are just measuring the wrong thing.
What repair teaches
To mend something you have to understand how it was made. A darn copies the weave; a patched jacket shows you where the cloth takes the strain. Repair is a quiet education in the objects around you.
Starting small
You don’t need to rebuild a chair. Sew a button back on this week. Darn one sock. Notice how different it feels to wear a thing you have saved.
It will not change the economy. It might change what you buy next.
¶ Written by
Oona Pike
Essayist
Oona writes the Thursday essay about repair, attention and owning fewer, better things. She is working on a book about the history of mending.
More from the journal
Essays
The last bell foundry in England
For three hundred years one yard in the East End cast the bells of half the world. Then it went quiet. What a town loses when it stops making the loud things.
Maud Ellery
Chronicles
A year of medieval bread
I baked from a single 1390 household book every week for a year. The bread was better than I expected, and the rules around it were stranger.
Tobias Wren
Craft
Making oak-gall ink at home
The ink of Magna Carta and most medieval books is made from wasp-stung oak galls, rusty iron and gum. You can make a bottle this weekend.
Isolde Marr
¶ The Thursday letter
One letter, every Thursday.
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