Page 1 of Fixing a Broken Heart at the Highland Repair Shop

So many stories begin with a broken heart. This one begins with a broken paper shredder. There will be a broken heart too, of course, only that hasn’t quite happened yet, and it’s a longer story than the one about the shredder, where it all began.

That day, his old pal, Sachin Roy, had come from his cottage a fair walk away down near Stranruthie village and was intent on making his broken shredder McIntyre’s business.

‘Have ye a part for this? I reckon it’s the motor,’ he said. No ‘how’s Roz and the kids?’ No small talk about the November weather.

McIntyre, however, didn’t mind this. He is one of life’s fixers and loves nothing more than an excuse to strip down a machine on his workbench and take a look inside.

He is also a renowned hoarder. Only, unlike the hoarders’ lives you see sensationalised on the telly, all the old junk he collected in the hope that ‘it’ll come in handy one day’ was beautifully – his wife would say obsessively – organised in labelled crates and tins, tubs and boxes on high shelves all around the huge barn that stands next to their historic old mill house with its working water wheel.

Of course it’s still working; it’s McIntyre’s.

‘Aye, I’ve just the thing,’ he’d said, and within half an hour, not only had he gone straight to the correct box and put his finger on just the right part, he’d tinkered and welded and dauded (which is a Scottish kind of gentle thump) and got the shredder going again, and he and Sachin were into the Bourbon Creams and Nescafe with powdered milk that he kept out there to save tramping dirty boots into the Mill kitchen.

Even on a cold winter’s day, the robins, crested tits and blackbirds around the feeders on the frosty lawn were singing loud enough for the men to catch their sounds over the hum of music on McIntyre’s radio. It was, as McIntyre would say, a braw day.

If you haven’t heard of this part of Scotland before, the Cairngorms, try to imagine soaring purple mountains topped with snow half the year round, rising from bands of smaller elevations that the hardy hillwalkers who flock here can easily bag before lunchtime.

On a very good day there’s glaring blue sky, and if you’re very lucky, you’ll spot a golden eagle gliding overhead, hunting their prey.

If that all sounds too remote and wet-weatherish for you, rest assured, you’re never more than a short drive from the more densely populated spots of Aviemore (due west, for the big ski resort, the tourist knickknacks, and the highest gin bar in Scotland), or there’s the Reindeer Centre a wee bit further south.

If you come across burly men tossing cabers or the King in his kilt, you’ve gone too far to the east and you’ve hit the Balmoral estate and Braemar, home of the Royal Highland Games.

Still curious? Look up any Instagram reel with the hashtag ‘My Heart is in the Highlands’ or ‘I Love the Cairngorms National Park’ and they’ll bring you straight here and make you wish you were lucky enough to live in this bonny spot like these two do, even if McIntyre’s life was a wee bit too cluttered to be considered picturesque.

‘What are you going to do with all this old gubbins?’ Sachin had said, looking around at the floor-to-beam shelves stuffed with tools, obscure machinery, scrap metal and wood, wires, cables and bits and bobs of all sorts.

‘ Do ?’ McIntyre held his biscuit mid-dunk.

‘When you pop your clogs. Who’ll deal with all this… accumulation.’

‘I’m fifty-seven and fit as a fiddle,’ he’d said, an eyebrow raised. ‘A year younger than you, in case you need reminding. Did Roz tell you to say something?’

‘ Phwah! No, no,’ Sachin protested unconvincingly. ‘But you’ve enough here to keep the whole of Scotland in spare parts for all eternity. One man cannot possibly use it all.’

‘Everything in time becomes useful again.’ McIntyre put the lid firmly on the biscuit tin, if Sachin was going to be like that. ‘Besides, it’s not just me uses it. See yourself? How often are you knocking at my door, looking for a hand?’

Sachin couldn’t deny this was true. Now that he’d taken early retirement, passing the storage unit company he used to run with his wife to his adult daughters, he was here near enough every week with some job or other. There was nothing McIntyre couldn’t mend.

‘And plenty of folks from across the park drop by,’ McIntyre went on.

‘Only yesterday, I soldered Post Office Pauline’s locket chain (he pronounced it sauder’d like everyone else from these parts), and some hiker lassie’s dog had snapped its collar out there on the roadside.

She waited in that very spot,’ McIntyre jabbed a finger towards Sachin, ‘while I stitched in a leather patch and a buckle I happened to have lying around. Good as new it was. No, Sachin, you cannot argue this collection benefits only me.’

Sachin looked sorrowfully at the out-of-bounds biscuits. ‘Right enough. You’re a one-man repair shop. You should advertise your services.’

McIntyre blinked and Sachin took this chance to strongarm his old friend. Truth was, he was talking off the top of his head and hadn’t given this a whole lot of thought before now, but something needed to change.

‘Like that programme on the BBC,’ Sachin said. ‘People come from all over with their items, and there’s a whole team of them fixin’ things.’

McIntyre wasn’t brushing the crumbs from his overalls and showing him out, so Sachin had taken this as a good sign and went on with his opinions.

Some of it sounded remarkably like Roz speaking. She must have had a word with Sachin at the town’s Samhain bonfire and sausage sizzle.

McIntyre knew everyone was concerned about him and the amount of time he’d spend out here since losing his job at the agricultural machinery servicing centre during the first lockdown.

Maybe he had taken the redundancy too hard?

Roz kept complaining how the twins missed their dad, but Ally and Murray had been living their own lives since they’d finished college and Murray only really came home to sleep at that point.

Maybe, more truthfully, it was his wife who missed him.

McIntyre had tried to gulp away the lump in his throat.

‘Open up my repair shed?’ he said at last. ‘For money? That doesnae sit right.’

He rose, walking round his bench, seemingly to inspect his shelves, one fist bunched at the hip of his overalls, the other gripping his mug.

‘Repairs shouldn’t cost. Everyone should know someone who can fix and repurpose any number of things, like my dad and his pals and all the mothers across this region, back in the day.

Between them nothing went to waste. No,’ he shook his head, now addressing the grease spots on the floor.

‘You cannae charge folks who want to keep a thing going, who cannae bear chuckin’ it in the landfill.

There’s enough money-grabbers out there! ’ He was getting het up now.

Sachin had lost the thread some time ago and really should have been getting home to Mrs Roy, if they were going to make it to the pictures in Inverness for three, but he had an inkling something important was happening, so he kept quiet.

McIntyre talked on. ‘There’s businesses out there making electronics designed so they cannae be repaired, devices and gadgets intended to turn obsolete within a few years, warranties worth nothing, clothes you wear once and they fall apart. It’s all bin that and buy again!’

He’d lifted a hand to a cardboard box marked ‘clock mechanisms and spares’. A solemn note was sneaking into his voice. ‘Nobody cares about any of this good old stuff. It’s consigned to the scrap heap before its time’s up, when there’s years of usefulness still left in it.’

Sachin was on his feet now too, astute enough to suspect McIntyre wasn’t only talking about throwaway objects , but people too. He gripped his now working shredder, shuffling awkwardly for the door. ‘I hope I havenae upset you, pal. Thanks anyway for this, and the coffee and biccies.’

McIntyre wasn’t upset, though. On the contrary, he was so wrapped up in thoughts of a non-disposable world he barely heard his friend leaving. His mind ticked and his eyes sharpened as he pictured his future.

‘A fixing factory?’ he was saying under his breath, scratching the back of his head. ‘Here, at the mill? No, a community repair hub! It’s madness. Is it no’?’

And that was how the idea for the Cairn Dhu Community Repair Shop and Café, famous all across the Cairngorms for its motley band of expert fixers and delicious home baking (not to mention the tiniest wee bit of scandal that threatened to spoil everything), first came into being.

Now that the story of the broken shredder is told, it’s time we got to the part about the broken heart; Ally McIntyre’s heart to be precise.