Nightriders

Since I left my job at the builders merchant, I have been trying to build up experience of both teaching in rigid trucks and driving articulated ones. One company in this area that takes agency drivers without Class 1 (artic) experience is The Royal Mail. It's a lovely company to work for, especially after the harsh world of the construction industry. A lot of the workers there are committed postal workers and would never have worked anywhere else. The company looks after the staff and the vehicles and I have been given training and support to get started driving artics, even though I am only an agency driver. So all in all, I like The Royal Mail.

Post moves at night. Nearly all the shifts involve a majority of driving during the hours of darkness and the canteens in a lot of the depots I visit are staffed all night.

Last night I did a shift which started here on the South coast around midday and finished back here 12 hours later. The bit in the middle was mainly spent driving around large mail centres in West London. I got to London around 5pm and left about 10.30pm. As I drove around these streets and junctions I knew solely from traffic reports - the Hangar Lane gyratory, the Polish war memorial roundabout - the traffic gradually died down as the sun set, and I gradually relaxed.

Yes, it is easier to drive an artic when the streets are empty, because artics are huge and there are lots of places around them where small vehicles like cars and bikes cannot be seen, and can easily get squashed. But it is also because as it gets dark, the population on the roads changes. The proportion of people driving for a living grows in relation to those who are just going about their daily lives and that feels safer, like you are part of a club, a club that looks out for its members. Let the self-absorbed car driver drive like they own the road in the day, they'll be gone soon enough, and we know we own the road at night.

There is a whole secret world out there of the night worker, the moles who burrow away when the rest of the world is sleeping. There is, as in any outsider community, a cameraderie among those whose working day is the wrong way up. The radio presenters, especially Alex Lester on Radio 2, cater to this peculiar bunch of truckers, shift workers and occasionally insomniacs or nursing mothers. The show is far too eccentric to be aired in the daytime.

The A roads are lined with parked up lorries with their curtains drawn, the driver sleeping inside. This lends an even more restful air to the night. I do have to be careful about taking naps whenever I can and making sure I have enough water and tea with me to keep me awake on the drive back from wherever I've been. But although I end up having less sleep than I would on day shifts and I haven't yet worked out a routine of what to eat when, I like it. I like the standing against the norm. I like the secret world.

A break

I haven't written any posts for a while. This is partly because it is the summer and there are lots of other things to do, partly because I am trying to simultaneously start 2 new careers (while planning a third) and I need to settle into them both before I can blog about them, and partly because I am not sure where this blog is going and I want to have a think about it.

I will be back.

On femininity: S Williams v Sharapova

Some observations on femininity.

I have struggled to write anything after the last post. It was deeply personal and received a good response so I felt as if the next one ought to be similarly profound.

But it isn't!

But it is related. I mentioned in my last post the kick I get out of being strong. I really like muscles on women and there are plenty of them about on the telly at the moment in the form of tennis players.

I watched the match today between Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams. These two women exhibit aggression, competitiveness and above all power while both being extremely beautiful and feminine. Sharapova's long elegant limbs and delicate facial features stood in contrast to Williams' voluptuous curves and strong face. They both had touches of girly adornments - Sharapova her jewellery and Williams her nails and both were wearing pretty dresses.

In both cases, the fact that they are extremely powerful women, who can serve at over 100mph and who hit the ball so hard it makes them shriek, does nothing to detract from their femininity. In fact, especially in Williams' case, I think her muscles heighten her femininity, much as Eddie Izzard looks sexier and more masculine in stillettos and makeup than he does without.

I love this image of women and womanliness that can incorporate physical power. I love watching women's tennis apart from one thing: I reckon they should play 5 sets in Grand Slams just as the men do.

It's time to come out

I think the time has come to talk about my own gender. I have talked about being a woman in a man's world. I have talked about masculinity in the workplace, both mine and that of my male colleagues but I have never actually made a concerted effort to write my own gender, to narrate, if you will, my own gender identity.

So here goes.

I'm scared.

I have always had a pretty strong masculine side. It was always something I both revelled in and was ashamed of, aggressively ramming it down people's throats to cover my own shame. All the time I secretly thought it would be something I would grow out of, once I'd sorted my head out, and grown up, that kind of thing.

But the fact is, I am in my mid-30s, pretty happy and sorted in life but it's still there. I stopped doing a manual job a couple of months ago and since then my upper body has got weaker, I am losing my muscles. I started to think, maybe that's ok, maybe I don't need them any more, maybe that phase is over. But I decided at the end of last week that no, it's not ok. I swam a mile on Saturday, kayaked for 2.5 hours on Sunday and am planning a session on a rowing machine for Wednesday. I want my muscles. I get a kick out of being strong.

I also get a kick out of having long curly hair and hour glass curves.

I could go into the psychoanalysis but I'm not going to. It doesn't matter how I came to be here, this is where I am and that's fine. It's not about fighting men. I like men, I fancy them and when I'm in a relationship, I like to feel like I'm the girl. Very few people have ever suggested that I am a lesbian. It's not about sexual orientation.

It's just that the gender binary doesn't work for me. I don't like my behaviour and my choices about how I earn my living or spend my time to be defined by society's perception of what I should do because I have certain body parts. I don't like the conflation of femininity with incompetence in spatial tasks. Spatial awareness is a skill that can be learned like any other. Professional male cricketers can't catch as well when they first start at school as they can after years of training. Builders don't put up shelves as well when they are apprentices as they do after 20 years on the job. Truckers of either sex are generally rubbish at parking when they first start. So you learn.

I recognise that the male and female minds and bodies are different to a certain extent for evolutionary reasons but they are nowhere near as different as society deems them to be. They are nowhere near as different as society wants and needs them to be. The binary is convenient for society, it's that old line in the sand thing. You're one of those, I'm one of these so we need to act like this.

It may be convenient for society but it isn't very convenient for me. I'm me, I do me things and I act in a me kind of a way.

I don't really attach a label to my gender identity. I don't really know what labels are out there, I'm quite new to this whole debate (I was going to grow out of it remember!). I tend to just think that I am a strong woman, both in body and character, who is in touch with both the femininity and masculinity within her.

Women in construction and the construction of women

I have been working in the construction industry for the last 3 years but I have started doing other stuff so I thought I'd tell you a little story about what may be one of my last experiences in the industry.

Picture the scene: I was driving my truck down into Weymouth from the Wareham coast road side. In front of me I could see the colourful tower on the esplanade with the hill of Portland behind and the sea, flat calm and glittering in the sunshine to the left. The lane I wanted was blocked due to road works so I pulled out into the right hand lane and moved slowly past the roadworks along with all the other traffic. In the roadworks a tarmac tipper lorry was parked up with its back tipped and perched above a hole in the road but still closed. As I drove past at a snail's pace I noticed that the driver was a woman. I stopped my truck, she turned to me and we shared a smile. Then I drove off and we both continued with our day.

It may be that she thought that the quickest way to get rid of me was to smile at me. It may be that she smiles at everybody. However, I have always found that women working in the construction industry have made a conscious choice to go against the grain, to do something all day every day that it is not expected for them to do. I think that a recognition of that shared experience was in that smile.

I have discussed my own reasons for doing the job in a previous post and I didn't speak to this woman to ask her why she does it. However, a lot of people looking from the outside think that women working in construction and other masculine roles are themselves masculine which is why they feel more at home there but in some ways the opposite is true. If you, as a woman, are surrounded all day by men doing manly things like lifting and digging and building things, you actually feel more like a woman. Your gender identity is less challenged - it is obvious that you are a woman, because all the others are blokes.

Good driver? #2: Lack of speeding tickets

Speed is a tricky subject. There is no doubt that speed kills: if a person is hit by a car travelling at 20mph, that person has a 1 in 10 chance of being killed. When that speed is doubled to 40mph, those chances are reversed - you would only have a 1 in 10 chance of surviving.

So yes, driving more slowly reduces the risk of road deaths.

However, a lack of speeding tickets is no more proof that you are a good driver than having speeding endorsements is proof that you are a bad one. Someone may drive inappropriately slowly, causing other drivers to get annoyed and do something stupid. That would not bring that person speeding tickets but it certainly wouldn't be good driving. Equally a person who drives like a nutter then brakes hard in time for cameras may also not have points on their licence but you wouldn't want them on the road.

Speed kills if you drive too fast to react to foreseeable hazards. A child running out in front of a car is often foreseeable. You may not actually be able to see the child itself but a flying ball, a school, other kids, an ice cream van, a park or just any residential street in the middle of day should all suggest that a child may be there somewhere.

To give another example, on a motorway in heavy traffic, cars often drive too close to each other to be able to stop if the car in front brakes suddenly. Say a lorry has a blow out and there is still debris on the road. One car spots the debris too late, brakes, swerves, and this action ripples back causing several cars to collide with each other at 70mph. Fair enough, none of those drivers could see that there was debris on the road - but nor could they see that there wasn't.

In both of these cases, a safe speed is actually below the speed limit. Limits and speed cameras reduce the need to think. The law on speeding and licence points gives the message that staying within the speed limit is all that is required to stay safe but it isn't. You also have to look ahead and to think. Equally, there are cases where driving above the speed limit is reasonably safe, especially as the limits are established for day time, busy driving, but unfortunately the law does not take this into account either. Driving at 40mph past a school at 3.15 in the afternoon is not the same crime as driving past the same school at 40mph at 3.15 in the morning and should not carry the same penalty but it does. Cameras and endorsements are blunt tools that give a blunt and misleading message.

But however much you may think that the use and placement of speed cameras is less about road safety and more about making councils money, if you persistently get caught driving above the speed limit thus risking your licence and thereby your lifestyle, that's your own silly fault! The signs are plenty big enough!

Driving Epistemology

Epistemology is the academic term referring to the filter through which you view the world and to the study of that filter. The quote that finds its way into many a Masters level essay on the subject is that "Where you stand depends on where you sit" (obviously if this were a masters level essay the quote would have to be attributed but it isn't), so my basic thesis with this post is that where you stand depends on which driving seat you are sitting in.

The vehicle you are driving, and the reason for driving it, affects your attitude to driving, to traffic as a whole and to other road users as individuals. So what is it that makes up your driving epistemology? Today I'm going to look at vehicle properties, reason for driving it, and perceived relationship to other road users although other factors are also relevant such as driving experience, gender, age.

First of all the vehicle itself, its physical properties: its size, manoeuvrability, acceleration, and visibility out of the front and the back. I am only going to talk about cars, vans and trucks because they are the ones I know best. I can ride a bike but am not a keen cyclist, I have been on a motorbike but only a couple of times and it wasn't me riding it.

Cars are small and light. They accelerate well (generally) and can fit in small gaps. The visibility is good all round. However, they are low down so you cannot see that far into the distance. Vans are fairly small and generally light if unladen. They can accelerate brilliantly and can fit in fairly small places. They are at times more manoeuvrable than a car although you cannot see out of the back and the mirrors aren't always as big as they could be. You are a little higher up than in a car and can see over cars. Lorries are large and heavy and when fully laden have very slow acceleration. Rigid ones do not like going round corners and articulated ones are extremely long. You cannot often see out of the back and even in an unladen flat-bed lorry there is still a huge blind spot behind it, easily big enough for a whole class of 5 year olds. Forwards they have fantastic visibility, you can see over everything apart from other lorries, can often see the reason for hold-ups. They have lots of mirrors although they also have blind spots. All of these properties inform the filter through which you view the traffic world and form the basis of your behaviour and attitudes.

Secondly the reason for driving plays a huge part. As a lorry driver if I am waiting to turn right from a major road into a minor road but am stopped by a stream of traffic, I will always look first for other lorries, then vans and buses, then lastly cars to let me cross. This is partly due to visibility as mentioned above but also drivers of lorries, vans and buses are generally at work. They spend hours on the road, know that the road system only works by people looking out for each other and they are being paid anyway so another couple of seconds doesn't make a huge difference. If you are on the way to work, it is your own time and any time given up is your own time wasted. Once you are at work, it's the boss' time so you don't mind 'wasting' it. A journey to the shops is one where the shopping is the primary focus and the journey is secondary, sometimes a frustration to be endured. Sometimes, if on the way back after an ordeal or on the way home when what is waiting for you is unappealing, an extended drive is a good thing and this will affect your behiaviour. These are all aspects of your driving epistemology.

The final aspect to discuss today is your perceived relationship to other road users. This is partly related to vehicle size but cars have a special place on the roads. Basically a car is the standard unit of road transport in this country today. In former times it may have been the horse, the horse and cart or the bicycle and these still predominate in other parts of the world but here it is the car. Road systems are designed for cars. Larger vehicles have to block two car lanes to get round some corners and cyclists are squashed into a too-narrow lane at the side and have to get off and walk at some junctions. So in terms of perceived relationships between various road users, cars are at the top of the tree. The car is the default option, anyone else has chosen to drive something different (fair enough there are people who can't drive and cycle as a result but many of them have made a conscious moral decision not to drive) and car drivers often relate to other road users accordingly. Their behaviour is based on this assumption of being the norm from which all others deviate.

And even for those of us who regularly drive other vehicles, once in a car it is very difficult not to do the same.