I Fixed a Zip and I Want Everyone to Know

It had been separating behind me for about a month, which is the failure everyone reads as the zip being finished. It is almost never the zip being finished.

The teeth were fine along the entire length. I checked them with a fingernail, one at a time, which took four minutes and felt ridiculous. What had gone was the slider — the little box that pulls the two sides together — which had worn wide inside and was no longer squeezing them shut.

A new slider is thirty rupees and comes in a paper envelope. Getting the old one off means taking the top stop off, which sounds like surgery and is actually just pliers and a willingness to be slightly rough with something you care about.

Twenty minutes. Thirty rupees. Six-year-old jacket, now working. I have replaced garments over this exact fault at least three times in my life, and every one of those was a slider.

It is a biscuit tin, obviously. It is always a biscuit tin. Mine came from my grandmother with about forty buttons already in it and I have been adding the little spare envelopes for fifteen years without ever once opening it to look.

There are two hundred and six buttons in there. I counted, on the floor, on a Wednesday evening, which is a thing you can do when you live alone.

Four of them matched things hanging in my cupboard right now. Two of those are garments I have not worn in a year specifically because a button is missing, which means for a year I have owned both the problem and the solution and kept them in different rooms.

That is the whole mending economy in one sentence. It is almost never a skills problem. It is a problem of not knowing what you already have.

In March I patched a pair at the knee and bought a new pair the same week, which was not an experiment, it was just a week where I had both a hole and some money.

The new pair went at the thigh in June, which is a seam failure and a much worse one to fix. The mended pair are fine. The patch is fine. The patch is, at this point, the strongest part of the garment.

Sample size of one. But it is my one, and I wore both of them.

It is about a third full. At the rate I use it — properly, maybe six times a year — it will see out this decade.

The shoes it was bought for are gone. One pair went at the sole, the other I gave away. The tin remains, which makes it, per year of service, one of the cheapest objects in this house.

Polishing is the single highest-return maintenance act available to a person who owns leather anything, and almost nobody does it, and the reason is not laziness. It is that it takes fifteen minutes and produces a result that looks like nothing happened, because looking like nothing happened is the entire goal.

Every other kind of repair announces itself. A patch is visible, a new zip slider is visible if you know. Polish is the only one where success is total invisibility, which is why it is the hardest one to feel good about doing and the easiest one to stop.