Jay Blades - Making It: How Love, Kindness and Community Helped Me Repair My Life

I F YOU HAVE HEARD OF ME, THE CHANCES ARE THAT YOU know me from The Repair Shop on BBC1. Im the jovial geezer in the flat cap who greets nervous visitors when they arrive in our workshop with treasured but damaged family heirlooms for us to repair.

The show has become a phenomenon. It started out tucked away on BBC2 but has now moved to evening primetime on the main channel as millions of viewers tune in each week to watch our team of talented experts restore old chairs, clocks, toys and other much-loved objects in need of a little tender, loving care.

The Repair Shop works so well because its not just about fixing broken stuff. Its about love, and wonderful family stories, and triggering the precious memories buried deep in those damaged artefacts that can often have both our visitors and us repairers in floods of tears.

I am the guy at the front who jollies everyone along and keeps things moving and yet I often tell people that by far the biggest repair job on The Repair Shop is me. I must admit I have had some seriously nasty knocks and scrapes along the road to where I am lucky enough to be now.

One thing I have learned from The Repair Shop is that everybody and I mean everybody has an amazing life story. Scratch just beneath the surface and brilliant stories fall out of heroic endeavours, passionate love affairs and vivid experiences that people will never, ever forget.

Im no different. My story is not unique. Im not the first, or the last, person to be raised by a single mum, with an absentee father. Im not the first guy to face racism, to go badly off the rails in his teens, or to have kids before he was ready or mature enough to raise a family.

Ive been more than a little bit naughty and I could have turned into a proper wrong un, but Im relieved to say that I managed to turn my life around. And the impulses that helped me to do that are the same ones that power The Repair Shop love, and family, and community.

Before I got into TV, I had another life. Actually, I had a few! I worked with homeless people and with would-be delinquent teenagers. I was a community worker, and a philosophy student. And, after being on the wrong side of the law, I even found myself policing the police!

Like everybody, Ive fallen in love and seen relationships go wrong. Ive done things that Ive been proud of, and made terrible mistakes. I even, not all that long ago, lost my way so catastrophically that I broke down and wondered if I wanted to carry on living at all.

Ive found it intense and humbling to revisit my lifes highs and lows for this memoir, but Im so pleased that I have. With hindsight I can now see that all of these things, good and bad, had to happen to me in order for me to finish up where I am now. Where I was destined to be.

There are many ways to make it, and I took the long way around. For a while, I was very broken, but for the last thirty years I have mostly been trying to help people make or repair things. It might be furniture, it might be a relationship: it might even be themselves. I love working in The Repair Shop, but it is only one element of the many ups and downs of my life story so far.

This is the story of my repair job: of how I made it. I hope that you enjoy it.

L ETS GET THIS STRAIGHT FROM THE START: THIS BOOK is not a misery memoir. It could not be further away from any of that Oh, woe is me! stuff you sometimes read. Whenever I think back on growing up as a little boy, I find a big smile spreading across my face. My childhood was beautiful.

That doesnt mean it was easy. I was brought up by a single mum in Hackney, which people always describe as a poor part of London (although it didnt feel that way to me). We had our hardships, and there were times that we didnt have a lot of food and didnt have a lot of money. But that never stopped me having the time of my life.

My memories of childhood are of playing in the sunshine with my mates; laughs around the estate and in the park; throwing sticks up horse chestnut trees, then using the laces from my shoes to play conkers (I guess Ive always been into upcycling!). I remember skipping everywhere. I remember... being happy.

Which is amazing because, when you look at the circumstances that I was born into, they were not all that promising.

I was born on 21 February 1970 in Edgware General Hospital in Brent, north London, and given the name Jason Willeslie Blades. My mother, Barbara, was just eighteen when she had me. And as soon as she and I were discharged, we went straight to a refuge for the homeless.

How did I come to be starting my life like that? Well, that is quite an interesting story.

My mum was born Barbara Barrow in Barbados and, when she was a little girl, her mum, Ethaline, did what a lot of Caribbean parents did she left her kids to be cared for by relatives and moved on her own to Britain, to try to make a better life for them. She worked as a nurse in care homes, in Aylesbury, then in London, and sent for my mum when she was thirteen. Mum came over with her younger sister, my Auntie Ann.

My grandmother was by then living with a guy called DArcy Blades, who said that he would accept her girls and look after them but only if they changed their surname to his. Thus, as soon as she arrived in England, Barbara Barrow became Barbara Blades.

Mum went to school in Hackney and, a year after she left, she got pregnant with me. My grandmother was by now living with another bloke, who was outraged at Mum being unmarried and pregnant and kicked her out of the house. He laid down the law that she had to go.

What a guy, eh? He was not a nice man. I only ever met him once, a lot later in my life, and from the second I set eyes on him, I knew: I do not like you. My gran didnt even stay with him for all that long. About four or five years later, she moved back to Barbados.

Mum and I fetched up in the homeless refuge for a few weeks and then we stayed with Mums brother, my Uncle Bertie, in his house in Stoke Newington, in Hackney. Uncle Bertie was there for us when we needed him which was more than you can say for my dad.

Well, dad sounds the wrong word. I dont even like calling the guy my dad, I prefer to call him The Man Who Contributed Towards My Birth, or TMWCTMB for short, because that is pretty much the sum total of all that he has ever done for me.

I learned in my early twenties that TMWCTMB (dont worry, youll soon get used to this!) was born in Jamaica and, like my mum, was raised by relatives there for years while his mum made them a life in London. As a lad, I didnt know any of that, or anything about him at all. Nor did I care. He just wasnt around.

I was still a baby when Mum and I moved out of Uncle Berties place to a ground-floor council flat a mile away on Cazenove Road, one of the main drags through Hackney. My brother, Justin, came along when I was two. The three of us lived there for the next eight years.

That flat had some pretty funky seventies British dcor. When I think back, I remember lots of orange and brown.