Fixing Things

I have a soft spot for broken things. I have even more of a soft spot for broken things that I can fix. I mean physical objects, by the way. I tinker with toys, not emotions.

Normally, yes, this takes the form of toys and Old Stuff; given my line of work and genetic predisposition towards having full sheds this shouldn’t be a surprise. But whenever I see something cracked or missing parts, something that most people are no longer going to want, I just have an urge to do something about it. And because I’m a big ol’ nerd with access to a wide variety of glues, paints and spare parts, I often can.

This is not to say I’m necessarily very good at fixing these things, of course. I aspire to be that guy from Toy Story 2 with all his lenses and brushes and tools, but in reality I am very much an enthusiastic amateur with little specific expertise. But hey: if it’s me doing an ok job or the bin, I think the former is preferable.

I’ve mended action figures – Transformers can be tricky, but it is possible; certain smaller ones from years ago have ball joints almost exactly the same as small LEGO ball joints, which means building whole replacement limbs can be done. And thanks to my bevy of spare Warhammer bits, I’ve occasionally gone even further with creating new parts. Something about seeing a cool robot dinosaur without its front legs tugs at the heartstrings. A bit of miniature paint will work wonders on a battered old figure, too, even if I can never get that gloss finish quite right.

Grimstone (left) found a new home with a very excited 5-year-old; Sky Blast (right) has found new employment with my own Megatron.

I’ve fixed books, too. There are few things as sad as seeing a book with a ravaged cover about to be thrown away. Judicious application of tape has saved many staples of my own shelves, but sometimes one need go further… like when I measured, cut and crafted an entire replacement cover for an about-to-be-binned copy of H.I.V.E from my school library and gave it several more years of happy legible life.

The reason I’m writing this post is because of the repair job I did this week to a piece of my deepest childhood, when a Brio Percy from Thomas the Tank Engine came into work battered almost beyond recognition. Barely a scrap of green paint left on it, the bare wood scribbled on with pen… an obviously very loved toy that would not, unfortunately, be getting much more love in this state.

And, as such situations have done many times before, it touched something in me. Things like this are meant to be used: books are meant to be read, toys are meant to be played with; and seeing them reduced to a state where they can only really be thrown away just makes me sad. It’s the Toy Story talking again, all that lovely ingrained anthropomorphising of objects that humans do so well, but I just don’t want to let these things ‘die’.

So I cracked open the green paint, which, while not as bright as I’d have preferred was good enough, and did what I could for poor old Percy. It wasn’t much, but it ended up being enough. Enough for another kid to come along and give this little engine another life of love.

Annoyingly Brio’s paint is just a bit glossy, so I need to get some varnishes for the next one. (Also I forgot to take a completely ‘before’ pic; none of that green was there before I started.)

It’s the little things, I suppose. Every time I manage to scrape the corrosion off old battery compartments, every time I find the missing pieces of a LEGO set, every time I glue new hands onto ancient bits of Warhammer, it feels like… I don’t know. Maybe giving back a little. We all have those toys and objects that mean so much to us for all our young lives. It feels better to fix them, to pass them on, than it does to throw them away. It feels like they deserve it.

These are things that create stories, things that spark the imagination, the sort of things that give me the ideas to write what I do. What is storytelling but the same thing you used to do on the playground with your friends, just tidied up a bit?

My shed’s going to end up full of so much broken crap when I’m old, isn’t it?