Photograph: Steve Peskett/BBC/Ricochet LtdĪs a teenager, Blades says he would be stopped and searched by the police “a lot”. Some of The Repair Shop team, from left: Brenton West, Amanda Middleditch, Dominic Chinea, Julie Tatchell, Lucia Scalisi, Kirsten Ramsay and Jay Blades. And that’s probably why it wasn’t picked up: ‘He’s black, you can’t teach him, he’s ignorant, put him in that class.’ That’s how they dealt with it.” “There were ways that teachers dealt with young black men – and even to this day, we still have alarming statistics about the exclusion rate of young black men, and the criminalisation of young black men. I was, like, why did no one do this before?” When I found out at university, the amount of support I got was unbelievable. “I would say at least 80-90% of us were dyslexic, but none of us were told that we were. He remembers physical violence from the teachers – being punched in the stomach, caned and beaten with a plimsoll. His dyslexia hadn’t been picked up instead he was put in a class with other “disruptive” boys, most of whom were black. He was also dyslexic – when he eventually went to university at the age of 30, “they found out that I had the reading ability of an 11-year-old. Instead, he fought back and was marked out as “disruptive”. The level of racism that I received in school was insane.” There wasn’t anyone he could speak to – it wasn’t the sort of thing he talked about with his mother, and there was no way he would have gone to his teachers, he says. “From the first year, it was a constant battle between me and the racists. “I didn’t understand the names at first, but I understood when someone punched me,” he says. It wasn’t until he went to secondary school in another borough that he discovered racism. They all knew my mum, and my mum knew their children. “All the adults were classified as uncles and aunties, so they would look after anybody. (It was then he found out his father had fathered 25 half-siblings he has been in touch with 12 of them.) Life on his council estate seemed sheltered and communal. He grew up in Hackney, east London, with his brother, brought up by their mother, who worked as a secretary his father wasn’t part of his life, and it remains that way, though Blades made brief contact with him when he was 21. But when I make something, I feel on top of the world.”īlades only discovered making and restoring things in his 30s (he is now 50). I had teachers telling me that I wasn’t going to amount to anything. “It’s almost as if you’ve got this virtual pat on your back that you’ve given yourself.” School, for him, wasn’t the “best experience. “The feelgood factor that you get when you fix something, or you redesign a chair and put a different fabric on it and you stand back and look at it,” he says. “That trend has been really refreshing to see,” he says.įor Blades, who also runs a furniture restoring business, repairing things comes with its own reward. Blades is hopeful that, with people at home more and paying more attention to their interiors, they will look at how to reuse items. The fairly recent shift towards “ fast furniture” – cheap items that are often disposed of when trends change – is “unbelievable” to him. But one of the things with shows like The Repair Shop or Money for Nothing is getting people more aware of what they’re doing to continue this mass consumerist, throwaway society.” Will that last? Blades, although optimistic by nature – he has a positive energy that crackles down the phone line – isn’t sure. While many of us have become enamoured of internet shopping, others have started to buy less as a result of the pandemic. ‘I had teachers telling me I wasn’t going to amount to anything.’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
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