The theme of this issue is Transition. Together, your stories explore lives shaped by movement, uncertainty, rupture, and change. What drew you to the moment or experience at the heart of your piece, and how does it speak to lives and a world in transition?

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Lorry drivers are almost always in motion, and yet their lives are remarkably easy to overlook. These three stories are an attempt to make visible some of the connections within a workforce that is often imagined as atomised and isolated: connections between drivers, but also to families, landscapes, workplaces and the strangers they encounter along the way. The stories follow very different relationships with movement, from Nick calculating his day around traffic, delivery slots and regulated hours, to Mike finding freedom in the strange intimacy of the night-time motorway, to Jenny developing a sense of responsibility for a layby she repeatedly returns to.  
 

But the idea of transition feels apt because lorry driving is a job structured by continual change. Supply chains have their own rhythms, from periods of economic downturn to seasonal peaks and sudden surges in demand, and drivers’ lives are expected to stretch and contract around them. On a smaller scale, every working day is full of transitions between movement and stillness, rushing and waiting, predictability and uncertainty. Nick’s story captures something of this, wherein a delay at one depot can cascade through the rest of his day, while his movements are simultaneously shaped by traffic, delivery schedules and the strict temporalities of drivers’ hours. And then there are much larger transitions being imagined for futures of road freight. The idea of the ‘driverless’ truck is particularly striking because it seems to extend an invisibility that already exists. We are accustomed to seeing the lorry while barely noticing the person inside it, and visions of autonomous freight go one step further and imagine the supply chain without that person at all. That makes this feel like an important moment to resist this urge, and to instead direct our attention towards the people who make these systems work, and towards the lives, relationships and forms of care that disappear when freight is imagined simply as the seamless movement of goods. 
 

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What inspired you to write this piece, and what do you hope readers will take from it?

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I have the privilege of leading a UKRI Economic and Social Research Council project on the working lives of UK lorry drivers, funded through the Transforming Working Lives programme. Through that research, and through conversations with drivers over the past decade, it became increasingly clear to me that we need different ways of understanding and talking about mobile working lives. Lorry driving is critical to contemporary supply chains, and yet the lives of the people doing that work are rarely narrated. That tension - between being indispensable and largely invisible - is where I began with these stories. The opening of the piece deliberately foregrounds that paradox, where for lorry drivers, mobility isn’t simply part of getting to work - being mobile is the work, generating new sets of relations and practices. I hope readers come away seeing something different when they next pass a lorry on the motorway or encounter a driver making a delivery. Rather than seeing the vehicle, or an obstacle to get around, I hope they glimpse the person inside it, and the complicated working life unfolding behind the windscreen. 
 

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The pieces in this issue range in tone from righteous rage to wistful nostalgia to quiet observation. How did you arrive at the tone of your piece, and what role does it play in conveying its central concerns?

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Quiet observation felt important because so much of what drivers have told me over the years concerns things that are simultaneously mundane and extraordinary. Their asks are often very basic: somewhere safe to park, access to a toilet, somewhere to get decent food, enough time to stop and rest. In Nick’s story, for instance, the absence of toilets becomes visible through something as ordinary as the Coke bottle packed with his lunch; later, in Jenny’s story, those same bottles reappear as objects she reluctantly collects from the roadside. I didn’t want to tell readers what to feel about those details. I wanted to stay close to the rhythms and textures of the drivers’ days and allow the indignities, pleasures and contradictions of the work to emerge through them. Mike can genuinely think he has the ‘best job in the world’, while another driver might experience intense surveillance, unsafe conditions or hostility. Holding those experiences together feels more truthful to me than reducing lorry driving to either hardship or romance. 
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What felt most important to bear witness to through your story?

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The person inside the cab. I want people to read these stories and then think about their own imaginaries of lorry drivers, and their own encounters with this workforce, on the motorway, at services, outside a supermarket or waiting behind a truck making a delivery. But I also wanted to bear witness to all the less visible relationships that make these mobile lives possible. The stories centre on drivers, but they are never really stories about individuals alone. Nick’s wife makes the lunch he takes with him each day, Mike exchanges waves with drivers he recognises on otherwise empty roads, Jenny’s daughter gives her the litter picker that eventually becomes part of a small collective practice, as other people see what she is doing and begin doing it themselves. Those small acts of care and recognition complicate the familiar image of the solitary driver. They show that even highly individualised mobile work is sustained through relationships with other people and places. 
 

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Do you think your story speaks to the possibility of an otherwise, and if so, how?

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Yes, although perhaps in deliberately modest ways. The ‘otherwise’ here isn’t a different transport system or supply chain; it begins with imagining people, place and relations differently. Jenny’s story captures this most clearly for me. A layby designed as a temporary stopping place becomes somewhere she knows intimately, cares for and feels responsible towards. What begins with cleaning the small patch beside her cab gradually expands until she is cleaning the whole layby, sharing photographs of what she has done, and other people begin doing the same. By the end, this anonymous piece of transport infrastructure has become her layby, a place of attachment, care and even community. Perhaps that is where the possibility of an otherwise sits in these stories - in recognising that infrastructures are not only roads, depots, schedules and vehicles. They are also made and remade through relations. If we start from the lives of the people who inhabit these spaces - what they need, what they notice, what they care for - then different ways of organising mobility and work might become imaginable. 

 

But I think the question of thinking and being ‘otherwise’ moves beyond lorry driving, towards the kinds of lives produced by supply chain capitalism more generally. Much of the apparent efficiency of contemporary supply chains depends on squeezing time and space: tighter delivery windows, less slack, faster turnaround, fewer places to stop. What looks like efficiency from the perspective of the system is experienced very differently by the worker trying to find time to eat, rest or use a toilet. Nick’s day makes that tension particularly visible, where he is constantly calculating whether he has ‘got time’, while where and when he can stop are dictated by routes, schedules and recorded hours. So perhaps an otherwise means asking what would happen if we adjusted the system rather than continually asking workers to adjust themselves to it. What if resilience meant building in enough time for delay, rest and unpredictability, rather than continually removing slack? What if the infrastructures of supply chains were public goods - designed around the bodies and lives of the people who work within them, providing safe places to stop, toilets, decent food and time to use them – rather than profits for shareholders and capital owners? These are not particularly radical demands. But they invite a different understanding of what an efficient supply chain is - not one that moves goods as quickly and cheaply as possible, but one capable of sustaining the people whose labour keeps it moving.