In the past, my paternal family has had strong links with the Royal Navy.

My grandfather from Gillingham was in the Senior Service from 1895 to 1924, serving throughout the First Word War, and leaving with the rank of Chief Petty Officer.

My father followed in his footsteps, being educated at the Royal Naval Hospital School in Greenwich, and serving in the Royal Navy from 1932 to 1946, including all of the Second World War. He also left with the rank of Chief Petty Officer.

More distant relatives also had Naval connections, while my grandfather and others on my mother's side had links to the Royal Dockyards as dockyard mateys.

So it is perhaps not surprising that my son also developed an interest in the sea, becoming an expert sailor in dinghies and cabin-cruisers.

When he was still a teenager living at home, his mother and I tried to reflect his nautical interest by decorating his bedroom with a wallpaper that had a gaff cutter motif.

We also found an original painting of HMS Dragon, by British watercolourist WJ Sutton.

The "Lucky Dragon" had been my father's main vessel during the war and the one about which he would most often regale his grandchildren with his wartime stories.

We also found a very nautical-looking brass porthole clock, marked "Royal Navy," though it was in fact a facsimile, that we had shipped over from India.

It really rounded off the nautical look of my son's bedroom.

Sadly the clock only worked for about five minutes.

My son didn't really mind too much, like most teenagers he used his phone to tell the time anyway.

He has long since left home and now works in the City and lives within a stone's throw of the House of Commons.

So I have taken over his bedroom as my Work-From-Home office.

Although my boy never complained about the clock that didn't work, I soon realised just how frustrating and pointless it is to have a non-functioning clock, however nice it looks.

My own feeble attempts at repair established that the problem was with the hands not gripping on the spindle properly.

But I got no farther.

Then I heard about the Repair Cafe at Bearsted. It is one of the many strands of the Bearsted Climate Action Network (CAN), a group of environmentalists who are seeking to find localised, practical ways to help save the planet.

The concept of the Repair Cafe is simple.

If you have something that is broken, instead of tossing it away and buying another, you take it along to the cafe where a collections of volunteers with different skills will have a go at fixing it for you.

If they are successful, it saves the item going to landfill, saves you money, and saves the waste of the earth's resources in making a new one unnecessarily.

It's win, win all round. But would they be able to fix my clock?

I took it along to the Repair Cafe which was being held in the WI Hall in Bearsted.

My first impression was one of surprise. I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't the hectic bustling place that I found.

I arrived five minutes after the opening time and already the place was buzzing with dozens of repairers sitting at their worktables, which were already piled high with broken items brought along by hopeful villagers.

Almost the first person I ran into was the local ward councillor, Valerie Springett. She was clutching a pair of dysfunctional boot warmers, and a rather battered bagatelle game, that she hoped the volunteers could fix.

The room looked chaotic, but in fact everything was very organised. A reception table logged you in, recorded your item for repair and directed you to the appropriate table.

There were tables for electrical goods, toys, jewellery, clothing, computers and even a place for fixing bikes.

At the back of the hall was a mouth-watering display of home-made cakes and buns, along with a tea and coffee counter - I guess that's the cafe part of the Repair Cafe.

The jolly ladies in the kitchen, kindly suggested that if I wasn't very hungry, I should take some of the cakes home and offered me a bag to do so.

I took it, it would have been churlish to refuse.

All repairs and all refreshments were free - though of course it was hoped you would make a donation to help towards the cost of the hall hire.

I soon found myself sitting at a bench with volunteer Bob Watts, a retired project manager with the railways.

Bob, 66, had my clock to pieces in no time, and within a further five minutes had it working and reassembled again.

He even fixed a dodgy hinge which I hadn't asked him to do.

Bob took the time to explain to me what he was doing as he went along, in the hope that if it went wrong again, I would be able to do the repair myself.

I assured him that I would, though to be honest I was secretly thinking that if I tried it, I would snap something off - that's what usually happens.

Finished earlier than I expected, I took a wander round and met a few people.

One of them was Jonathan Wentzel, a GP from the Marden Medical Centre, who was there as one of the volunteer repairers.

Assisted by Jeff Chismon, he was tackling Cllr Springett's bagatelle.

I was a little concerned when he seemed to be about to take a hammer to it - Cllr Springett had told me it was a treasured family heirloom of several generations' standing.

But when I saw her later, she seemed happy with the outcome.

I soon discovered that there was much more going on at the Repair Cafe than just repairing.

Bearsted CAN is a collection of like-minded individual all tackling climate change in their own way.

So I discovered the recycling table where items that would otherwise be thrown away were cut up, restitched or re-glued and generally turned into something useful again.

Then there was a table manned by Maureen Rainey for Kent Wildlife, stressing how litter and pollution was harming nature, but how we could help the environment by improving our own gardens.

There was even a group called Surfers Against Sewage, which at first sounded a little incongruous in land-locked Bearsted, until it was explained to me that it is the junk that we are putting down our drains here, that is polluting the seas in Cornwall (and everywhere else).

I was by now beginning to feel just a little overwhelmed by how much there was we should be all be doing - and how little I personally was doing.

I had time just for one more visit. In the car park, I found Alicia Sharp from Zero Waste on Wheels. She has turned saving the planet into a business.

Zero Waste on Wheels is a mobile refilling station, where you can take your own container along and top it up with items such as laundry detergents, hand soaps and shampoos from her bulk containers. It cuts out the waste of packaging and it's cheaper!

Ms Sharpe, a mum of two, tours fairs and events with her van, but also has regular customers that she makes home deliveries to.

All her products are - of course - biodegradable, vegan and cruelty free.

It was time for me to return home and put my newly restored clock back on the wall.

But I did later enquire of Bearsted CAN how successful the event had been. Because of their meticulous record-keeping they were able to tell me exactly.

The public had taken along 62 items to be mended, and the volunteers had successfully repaired 29 of them.

You can find out more about Bearsted CAN on their website here.

The next Repair Cafe is again in the WI Hall in The Street, Bearsted.

It is on Saturday, April 29, from 1pm till 4pm.

All are welcome. You don't have to live in Bearsted.