Built to Break

Plastic childhoods, inherited skill, and the cost of forgetting how to make things

In an age of moulded plastic and planned obsolescence, the stubborn persistence of human hands.

The wheel came off in her hand.

Not gently. Not ceremoniously. It snapped with that small, insulting sound plastic makes when it gives up – like a fingernail cracking. One minute the bright red truck was roaring across the living room rug, the next it lay on its side, axle sheared clean through.

She stared at it as though it had betrayed her.

Grandpa, in his armchair by the window, lowered his book. “Ah,” he said softly. “That’s the trouble with things that are born in a mould.”

She carried the truck over in both hands. “Can you fix it?”

He turned it over, thumb rubbing the brittle grey nub where the wheel had been. “I could glue it,” he said. “But it would never really be whole again.”

She frowned. “Then what?”

He studied her for a moment – the fierce crease between her eyebrows, the way she still believed the world could be repaired.

“Well,” he said. “We could make you a better one.”