Colm O'Regan: Sometimes the road to a better planet is coated in grease

I don’t mind reiterating: Let’s celebrate the workshop. 

One of our outhouses on the farm was called the workshop. It had a vice in it and numerous containers with waste oil in it. 

There was Swarfega, old calendars with sums written on them about lengths of timber, the keys to all the cars we ever had since the 60s and my father’s large collection of newspaper clippings that got sent to him and he sent to others. 

I love workshops. Not because I’m any good at fixing things but just being in messy places where quiet genius takes place makes my soul sing.

There is that moment when you bring ‘The Yoke To Yer Man’ or ‘Yer Wan’ and they tell you “they’ll see what they can do” and you leave with hope in your heart.

It helps that I have an almost pathological attachment to inanimate objects. Not like “that” ya pervert. It’s just that I attach so much meaning to them. 

So when someone fixes a thing I love, it’s like they’re wearing scrubs and they’ve just come out of the operating theatre and said “He [your alternator] is out of danger”.

There’s a fella on Facebook who posts progress photos of stripped down lawnmowers and I’m hooked.

This week was just a triumph of mending.

First up the bike shop fixed my bike up so well, that it was like getting an electric one.

They went all CSI on it, taking it apart and putting it back together, so much so that my acoustic bike now feels electric. 

I keep looking to see if they’ve hidden any micromotors somewhere in the frame. Mechanical doping like the Tour De France. but they hadn’t. They’d just rescued it from me.

But the main event was on another bike. The seat post has rusted into complete seizure. It had been left outside for too long. (And that’s another story. I have lost the art of minding things properly.)

No one can move it high nor dry. Until Marcus at the motorbike shop takes out — in sequence — a blow torch, a massive monkey wrench, and finally a hammer (with an incongruous car jack supporting the frame of the bike) to allow him to try and hammer the seat post in a smidge.

There is a shout. Movement!

Then he welds a chisel onto the seized seat post to make a lever and he and his mate wrestle the big T back and forth until it comes out.

We cheer.

Is that a Parkside Welder? I ask, leaning in a doorway as if welding all my life.

It is! He says excitedly and we launch into an animated chat about the unexpected quality of Lidl hardware.

“Good for small jobs.” He notes. As if warning me not to be welding plates onto the hull of an ocean going vessel.

Already I’m dreaming of welding. Making a gate in my mind. Along with a hitch on your car and a chainsaw, the ability to weld is essential to true happiness according to a self-help book I’m going to write. And a workshop.

So let’s hear it for workshop men and women. The people fixing things in sheds that were never meant to hold that much stuff. One day they’re going to sort out that pile, when they get a chance.

Far away from the strategising and grants, these are people who are truly sustainable.

Sometimes the road to a better planet is coated in grease.