Part I
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The alarm clock beeps.

He knows what he needs to do. 

Get up, kettle on, shower, make coffee, pour it into his keep cup, get sandwiches from the fridge. Same routine, different day. 

From alarm to leaving the house his record is seventeen minutes. Today he stood in the shower a little longer, so he leaves the house at 3.21 am. 

His home to the depot takes thirteen minutes with no traffic. At this time of the morning there’s rarely traffic. 

By 3.45 am, Nick has picked up his schedule from his pigeonhole and is at his lorry doing the safety checks. He wants to leave the yard before 4 am to miss the rush hour traffic past Birmingham. 

Technically, his first pick up isn’t until 7 am, but he knows that if he sets off at 5.50 am – giving the 70 minutes for the journey that the transport planners say it will take – he will miss his depot slot. If that happens his whole day will be off: he won’t get loaded until there’s a gap; he’ll get a fine for turning up late; he’ll be late to drop off; and he’ll miss his next pick up. 

Pre-empting this cascade, he sets off at 4 am. He arrives at 5.10 am, and pulls up nearby. He can’t get into the depot yet as it isn’t open, but he has a layby he quite likes. 

The first drop off is the easiest one to schedule, because he’s only been driving for 70 minutes. After that it gets complicated. 

When Nick first started driving the rules on drivers’ hours were flexible. He used a paper tachograph to record his times, providing some room for creative accounting. Nowadays his time is strictly regulated and electronically monitored. Making it more difficult to ‘find time.’ 

There are driving and resting rules. And loads of exceptions. 

He feels like he’s constantly trying to figure out if he’s ‘got time’ to stop, to rest, to eat, to meet a delivery deadline. Where Nick can stop is dictated by his route, his schedule, and his recorded hours. 

Often there’s no (healthy) food, and no toilets. 

Nick packs his lunch each evening, or more accurately, his wife does. It always takes the same form: ham and cheese cob, bag of Walkers crisps, bottle of Coke Zero. Oftentimes it’s gone by 10 am and he’s looking for a second lunch. 

But thank goodness for that Coke bottle. When nature calls and you’re trapped in your cab, it is a very useful container to have on hand. 

Nick arrives at the depot at 6.55 am. Already there’s a queue forming and he’s fifth in line. ‘Damn it,’ he thinks. He should have left the layby sooner. But he knows he’ll meet his time slot and be out by 8am. On his way for another long day on the road. 
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Image of lorry driver waiting. Photo taken by Debbie Hopkins, May 2018.

Part II
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‘Best job in the world’ Mike thinks as he trundles up the empty motorway. 

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It’s a quarter past midnight, the roads are clear except a few cars and a number of lorries. He does the same route, the same job, three nights a week. 

He knows the road, he knows when the road lights dip, he knows how long it should take – three hours 37 minutes, his best time – three hours 26 minutes (4 May 2012), and his worst time – six hours 44 minutes (2 March 2018).

When he took semi-retirement in his mid-50s, Mike decided to fulfil a lifelong dream and learn how to drive a lorry. His partner Jo thought he was crazy. 

She couldn’t understand why after three decades as a management consultant advising big international banks and manufacturers, he would want to retrain in his retirement – let alone as a lorry driver. 

He couldn’t explain it to her. He didn’t need the money, but he didn’t want to sit at home and get old. He wanted to see the country. He’d been stuck in the office for 30-odd years of long stressful days.  

Night-shift trunking (driving motorway routes connecting freight depots) wasn’t quite what he’d imagined when daydreaming about lorry driving, but it was the best he could get as a newly qualified driver, and he got used to it. 

While other drivers had to deal with ‘nightmare’ bosses and close surveillance, unsafe and old trucks, and hostile customers – Mike was well treated and left alone, so he was happy.  
 

He drives up to one warehouse, picks up a trailer and drives home. That’s it. 

No-one talks to him except a bit of light chatter at the warehouse. But he doesn’t feel lonely, he sees some familiar vehicles on the roads, he waves at other lorry drivers (sometimes even car drivers!) and 9 times out of 10 they wave back. He thinks this is unique to the nightshift, everyone looks out for each other. 

Sometimes he thinks about doing day shifts, but the traffic – oh the traffic!

Because the trailer carries drinks products, he isn’t allowed to stop outside of a secure depot, so he just drives A to B and back again. Sometimes he might try a different route. But mostly he listens to podcasts as he carries Coca Cola bottles across the country, thinking ‘this is the best job in the world.’​​​
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Image of motorway at night taken from a lorry. Photo taken by Debbie Hopkins, June 2018.
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Part III
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It was late morning by the time Jenny pulled into the layby. Her layby. She’d been coming here for months; she understood its rhythms, its cycles. When it would be busy with other vehicles, when the bushes and trees would be trimmed, when it would need her. 

Of course the layby – purposefully designed and built just off a busy A-road on the outskirts of a busy market town – didn’t really need her. But she felt a connection there, like she made it a better place, that her work there mattered. 

Usually she arrived at the layby in her 44-tonne articulated lorry. But today she’d come by car. She’d try, if her schedule allowed, to stop over once a week to check up on it; to keep an eye on things. 

It felt different arriving in her little Volkswagen Up! She didn’t like feeling small, vulnerable. 

Jenny parked at the furthest end. She had the layby to herself, just the way she liked it when she had work to do. 

Today was her day off (paid) work. But she’d been running errands all morning: picking up her granddaughter Stacey and dropping her at school; popping to the supermarket before it got too busy (and all the car parks were full); picking up a parcel at the post office; then back home to pick up her bag of tools before coming out to her layby. 

Jenny got out of her car and opened the boot. Inside she organised her tools: plastic gloves, a roll of white bags, working boots, a high-visibility jacket and her litter picker. 

Once she’d put on her boots and her jacket, she set off to the furthest end. She liked to work backwards, returning to her car when bags were full. The most she’d every collected was eight bags full of litter. But as she walked down its length she knew today wouldn’t reach that. 
 

She’d started litter picking by accident really. 

As a tramper driver, Jenny would sleep in her lorry for two or three nights per week. Her layby had become a regular stop between two depots, and she got more and more annoyed at the rubbish left there. 

For Christmas two years ago, her daughter had got her a litter picker and fluorescent jacket as a Secret-Santa joke. 

It took her some time to actually use them. She was a bit embarrassed, and she didn’t want to draw attention to herself (she got enough attention being a female lorry driver). 

Initially she started by just cleaning the piece of ground right next to her cab, then slowly circled out further and further until she had picked up every last piece of litter. 

She was proud. She took photographs of what she’d collected and shared them on social media. People told her what a good job she’d done. Some of them started doing it too. 

Jenny found herself wondering about the people who had left the litter. She found children’s toys, fast food packaging, pieces of clothes, cookware, personal hygiene products. 

She would sit in her cab in the evening thinking about the people who had stayed in her layby that day. Maybe they were having lunch? Maybe they were taking a snooze? Maybe they were meeting a lover?

But there was one item Jenny found most often. Something she didn’t really like collecting. On one particular collection she found 32 discarded around her layby: plastic bottles.

But not any kind of plastic bottles. These are full of urine. 

She would sometimes find herself gazing at the bottles, thinking about how intimate that liquid was. She’d also feel a little bit envious, since she couldn’t urinate in a bottle and hated having to look for toilets when she was working. 

Jenny spent nearly two hours collecting six bags of rubbish. In that time six cars, four vans and three lorries pulled into her layby. 

Some of the occupants spoke to her. A friendly ‘hello,’ but she could see them watching her. And she liked their gaze, she felt strong and important. 

It was early afternoon when she left her layby behind and travelled home along the pothole-ridden roads. 

She knew the journey well, it had become a habit coming out here on her days off, particularly when she thought her route the following week would take her in a different direction. 
 

When she got home, she went on social media to share her photos of the day’s collection. Underneath the photograph she typed: Truckers Cleaning Up Britain, One Layby At a Time. 

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