Text 1: The table where nothing is useless, by Mira Sen

An original contemporary online feature.

On Saturday mornings, the community hall sounds like a kitchen drawer being shaken. Screwdrivers roll across tables, lids snap open and small metal parts land in saucers for safekeeping. At the door, a queue forms: a silent radio, a limping suitcase, two lamps and a clock that has refused to move beyond ten past four.

The rule of the repair workshop is that owners stay beside their belongings. “We don’t perform miracles behind a curtain,” says Dani Cole, one of the volunteers. “You sit with us, and we work it out together.” She is examining the radio while its owner, Mr Abbas, watches. Dani turns one control, listens, then removes the back. Her movements are unhurried. Around her, the hall hums with the quiet concentration of an examination room.

Not every object is valuable in the usual sense. At the next table, Nina Park has brought a china bird with one wing in a paper bag. It belonged to her mother and was broken while she was moving house. The volunteer repairing it spends twenty minutes arranging the fragments before reaching for the adhesive. Nina does not speak. When the bird is finally upright, the crack is still visible, but she smiles as if something larger has been restored.

Other repairs are less successful. One lamp cannot be made safe and a food mixer needs a part that is no longer available. Nobody disguises these failures. Advice is given, labels are attached and the next object is lifted onto the table. The workshop’s purpose is not to promise that everything can be saved, but to make throwing something away the final choice rather than the first.

Near closing time, the radio suddenly produces three seconds of music. Mr Abbas laughs; Dani does not. She bends closer, adjusts the control again and waits until the tune returns without interruption. Only then does she push the radio across the table. The queue has gone, but the hall is covered with evidence: loose threads, curls of wire, grains of sawdust and several empty paper bags. Nothing here looks tidy. Quite a lot of it works.

Text 2: Among the chair-menders, by A Visitor

An original newspaper sketch written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this newspaper sketch, published in 1883, a visitor describes a yard where a family repairs household chairs.

Beyond a passage between two houses, we discovered a little yard occupied by chairs in every condition of distress. Some had lost an arm, some leaned helplessly upon three legs, while others showed only an empty frame where the woven seat should have been. They stood in rows against the wall like patients awaiting the surgeon.

Their surgeon was Mr Elias Ward, assisted by his two daughters. At one bench he tightened a loose joint; at another, Clara drew narrow strips across a chair seat, passing each one over and under its neighbour. The younger daughter, May, trimmed the ends with a small knife. Their hands seldom paused, though the yard was cold and a fine rain crept beneath the roof.

Customers arrived throughout the afternoon. A cab driver brought a chair from his kitchen and asked whether it might serve another winter. An elderly woman waited while Mr Ward repaired a wooden rocker polished by long use. “A new chair would not know my corner,” she said, resting one hand upon its back. Here, an object was not discarded merely because fashion had changed or a joint had worked loose. It represented money carefully spent and years of familiar service.

The menders received little for their labour. Mr Ward examined each chair before naming a few coins, and more than once accepted less when a customer hesitated. Yet there was no haste in the work. He tested every joint against the ground, while Clara pressed each newly woven seat with both hands. A chair leaving the yard had to be ready not for display, but for the daily weight of a household.

When evening came, the repaired chairs were carried home and the hopeless cases were broken up for useful wood. The yard was still crowded, but its rows no longer resembled a company of invalids. We had entered smiling at this kingdom of damaged furniture; we departed respecting the patience by which humble things, and humble purses, were preserved.

These texts explore places where damaged possessions are given a longer life.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the repairers and the reasons for mending things
• how the writers present the work of repair

You must use the text to support your comments and make it clear which text you are referring to.