Of all the things I never learnt to do, this still needles

There’s this alteration place I absolutely love. The attention to detail is perfect. Stripes and spots match up. Seams unpuckered. The kindness and patience of the two old ladies who work there is unparallelled. As one old lady to these others, I salute your long-standing efforts in your field.

But it takes a lot to get me to visit them. For a hem and, ahem, a thigh-to-ankle realignment, it’s nearly a hundred bucks. They make my new linen pants look they were made for someone too short and too broad for most modern clothiers. If I need to do repairs rather than alterations, I make a quick calculation to work out if the repair will extend the life of the garment enough to pay for itself.

And, yes, it pays to get those expensive Spanish shoes stitched up – but, no, it’s just not possible to get them re-soled, for reasons that can only be about planned obsolescence. And why do orthotics destroy the insides of my trainers?

So I envy the French whose government is about to make the whole reuse-repair-recycle thing affordable. Yes, the country that spurred on our consumption madness, from haute couture to Camembert, is now asking its citizens to reconsider. Instead of sending clothes to landfill, the French government is launching a bonus scheme of somewhere between $10 and $40 a repair to persuade consumers to fix their clothes and worn-out shoes instead of throwing them away and buying new ones. You’d also have to imagine that the kinds of products that can be repaired will benefit from increased sales.

John Gertsakis, sustainability maven and now attached to the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures, tells me Australia is asleep at the wheel when it comes to repairing and reusing. Will the French plan work to stop landfill? Gertsakis is a fan of any innovation that might slow our mountains of waste. We need to take repairability and durability very seriously. He quotes Vivienne Westwood: Buy less. Choose well. Make it last.

Sure, tell me how you fix everything yourself. I am so admiring of your patching and darning. But that’s not me. There’s a whole bunch of stuff I avoided learning while a young woman. Never learnt to ride a bike, never learnt to touch type, didn’t learn to swim until I was extremely adult. I can’t make gravy. I refuse to change lightbulbs because climbing ladders makes me feel like chundering. I’ve had to rely on the kindness of near strangers to knit for my grandchildren. These are just some of the things that are essential life skills but which I’ve never mastered.

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But worst of all, for the daughter of a dressmaker, I never learnt to sew. Now please let me join generations of children in attributing blame to my parents, without the cost of a therapist. Mum spent a lot of time telling me about the importance of education and why manual skills were not where the future lay (Mum! You should have encouraged me to be a plumber. The only one I know retired at 50 and bought boats for his daughters.) So, naturally, I can barely sew on a button let alone take up the hem on a pair of pants. I went to mend my favourite red apron, the one with cherries on the front pocket, and realised I was struggling to even thread a needle – and it wasn’t just my failing eyes. It was a lack of practice.

Now I have to confess, for a long time, I embraced and even highlighted my inability to sew. If my cheesecloth skirts developed holes, I’d gather the fabric up and knot it or use a rubber band to annexe the hole into its own separate little bundle. My skirts ended up looking as if they had developed tiny fabric warts. Or I’d just wear something even if it was worn out. For me, rips in my clothing have always been fashionable.