REPAIR SHOP’S Tears are sign beloved items are like family
His world falling apart around him, and believing the words of his teachers who told him he was a “nobody”, desperate Jay Blades had hit rock bottom and was hellbent on killing himself.
Slamming his foot on the pedal of his battered BMW as he roared along the M5, Jay was going to smash into the next motorway bridge and end it all in the early hours of a cold April morning.
Jay, now the presenter of the BBC’s hit show The Repair Shop, says that behind the darkest moment of his life, just six years ago, was the realisation that he – the furniture restorer who was an expert at fixing things – could not fix himself.
Now 51, he says: “I was unable to see tomorrow, I couldn’t see myself existing in the future.
“It was everything, the breakdown of my marriage, my business, me not being able to speak about it to anyone.
“At that moment what was going through my head was everything I’d heard at secondary school, that I was nothing, a failure.
“My careers teacher when I was 14 told me it wasn’t worth trying because my life would always amount to nothing.
“All my life I’d put all that negativity in a box. Now the lid had closed and I had entered a world that was dark, completely dark. I couldn’t even think straight about the effect on my kids, who I loved more than life itself.”
Jay firmly believes that the only thing that saved him was the fact that all the motorway bridges he drove past that morning had crash barriers. “If the barriers weren’t there you wouldn’t be speaking to me right now,” he says.
Soon afterwards, Jay ran out of petrol. He found himself in a near-deserted car park next to a retail park in Wolverhampton, Staffs – 100 miles away from his then home in High Wycombe, Bucks.
Oblivious to time, he sat slumped in his car for around a week. It was his own foul smell that eventually jolted him out of his stupor.
“I wasn’t eating or drinking. I lost a stone during that week,” he recalls. “When you’re in that zone, normal thinking, like ‘go and have a wash’, ‘drink something’, ‘have breakfast’, all those are irrelevant.
“I didn’t even know what time it was, it was just a dead zone.
“Eventually I decided to go to McDonald’s. I got out the car and could feel a presence.
“It was my body odour. It was so strong it had its own postcode.
“I thought there was someone behind me but it was me. That’s when I decided I needed to go and get washed up.”
Jay found a hotel in Wolverhampton and showered before putting his dirty clothes back on.
His soon-to-be ex-wife Jade had called the police, who had launched a nationwide search.
They had been tracking his credit card and arrived at the hotel with a psychiatric nurse to assess whether he
THE premise behind The Repair Shop – “making life better, fixing things” – is a metaphor for his own life, according to Jay. And it often makes him emotional and teary.
“My first customer was a woman called Helen whose piano stool had been damaged by her dog,” he says. “When she came back in, we did the big reveal. Helen was the first person to cry on the show.
“It was the moment that the penny dropped: ‘Wow, this show is going to be even more powerful than I thought!’”
Another favourite was a pump organ, which had been brought from Jamaica on the Windrush by the mum of two Birmingham sisters.
He says: “Imagine transporting that lovely beast for weeks on that crowded ship.
“When [the sisters] walked in, they looked like my aunties from Hackney and I wanted to hug them. So I did.
“These aren’t just items that we’re fixing. They’re family members. There is so much history and memories bound up in them.” Jay adds: “We are restoring family members and returning them to where they belong – which is the heart of
the family.” needed to be sectioned. The officer told him: “We think you might be a danger to yourself, sir.” Eventually they let him go with a friend – and the man Jay credits with saving his life – Gerald Bailey, owner of the Diffusion fashion chain. Gerald arranged for him to stay with his mum and stepdad, who became like a second family. Jay’s remarkable recovery is especially poignant during Mental Health Awareness Week, which began yesterday. And in his new book Making It, Jay describes the moment he sat in Gerald’s car that day as “the most significant moment of my life”.
He says: “I sobbed. Proper, shoulderheaving, gut-wrenching, inconsolable