Seven years ago Jay Blades was like one of those broken jukeboxes or scrapheap toys that tearful punters bring to his Repair Shop. At 45, after half a lifetime of knocks and scrapes he couldn’t see a future for himself. His solution one night was to get into his car, overloaded with a sense of pain and failure, and drive away from his home and his business and his wife and his daughter in High Wycombe through the night to he didn’t know where.
He ended up in a McDonald’s car park in Wolverhampton having just about avoided writing off the car and himself on a motorway bridge. He sat in the car in that car park for hours and then days, eventually sobbing his way back to life. With the help of a friend in the city, and that friend’s parents who “adopted” him, he started to remake and mend himself. Looking back on that period now, he says the closest he can come to describing it is a feeling like drowning and then coming up for air, a rebirth. In the years since, he says, he has never stopped being overjoyed that he can breathe.
