| The
natural heirs of the old coaches that brought prosperity
to the Great North Road’s towns and villages
are the forty-ton trucks that thunder up and down.
When I first came to London I worked in a bookshop
near Smithfield Market, by chance one of the starting/finishing
points of the road. One evening I shared a cup of Thermos
coffee with a driver called John from Aberdeen. Three
times a week he made the run from near the top of Scotland
to deliver prime beef to Smithfield and of course for
John the road was no such thing as the ‘north’
road, but the gateway south. Houseproud, he showed me round
his cab: curtains, bunk beds, little stove between the seats,
a television mounted on the dashboard. Hundreds if not thousands
of Johns drive the road every day and night; and when the
light fades, and the tachograph tells them they have reached
the limit of their permitted mileage, you see them parked
up in lay-bys and corralled in truckstops such as Kate’s
Cabin, their cabs flickering spectrally with blue light. |
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