Repair Shop

It's got to be cool like an Apple Store, not hippy and arty like a craft shop, and definitely not greasy and nerdy like Games Workshop or Maplin. But it's a bit of all of them.

It'll sell needles, and threads and screws and some bits of circuitry.

There are "genius bar" equivalents, where you can get advice on electronics ("oh yes, that just needs a new x" or "it's buggered, but we can sell you a better one if you want") or on carpentry, I suppose. Maybe bikes too? Scooters? Cars?

There are classes, which you would book into online. Twenty places, Saturday morning at 11am and we'll all be darning holes in socks, sitting round a big wooden round-table worktop in the middle. You and the girlfriend turn up with your socks, a teacher darns socks and talks you through the real basics while his hands are projected onto a screen for all to see. You chat and joke about how useless you are with the other participants, all while learning skills that your (grand)mother never taught you. Maybe buy a coffee.

Or you all turn up with your broken toasters, and we unscrew them, have a look inside and see if we can spot common faults. There are sockets in the middle of the table so you can test it after each check, to see if you uncovered the problem.

If you need a certain colour or thread or wool, or you need to buy some solder, or a solenoid, or some wire, you can just go and pick it off the wall, pay for it, and come back to the table.

These classes are like Games Workshop battles, in that it's social and designed to make you buy stuff, and part Apple Store teach in that there's a single expert guiding you through a complicated set of tasks. The classes would cost something like £3.99, all to the expert, and the shop just hopes people buy stuff.

The shop has soldering equipment, sewing machines, big tools you wouldn't have at home, that sort of thing.

This feels like a right-on-the-zeitgeist business to me. My generation knows we shouldn't be buying and throwing away, but we've no idea how to fix even basic things. We need to save money because we've been made redundant. And we're looking for sociable things to do that aren't as crass as clubbing.