When we were children, my brother and I had a number of car games we would play to enliven long journeys. Our favourite was the one we played on motorways, where we would collect “wavy men”. “Wavy men” were lorry drivers who responded to our frantic hand-waggling out of the rear window.
It’s a long time since I’ve felt the urge to wave to a lorry driver. The hand gestures I’ve felt prompted to perform in recent years are of a rather more adult variety, as yet another 40-tonne juggernaut pulls out of the slow lane mere millimetres from my front bumper, overwhelmed by a sudden need to overtake the truck in front of it. Or as I glance in my rear-view mirror and see, headlights ablaze and murder in their drivers’ hearts, two 40-tonne megatrucks bearing down at tachograph-busting velocity, leaving me desperately veering in their headwinds, paintwork undergoing 1,000 firing squads of grit.
This being a far from rare occurrence, it was with a cynical twist of the lips that I read a recent interview with the truck tycoon Eddie Stobart, in which he claimed he gets “some really lovely letters. They are often from women. They say, I was driving late at night and I came up behind one of your vehicles and I felt really safe because I thought one of your drivers would help me.” Help them? One’s heart goes out to these women. If they feel safe in the hurtling slipstream of a lorry, one can be forgiven for wondering what their home life is like – without even taking into consideration the mental stability of people who write to truck companies anyway, let alone join the apparently 25,000 strong Eddie Stobart fan club.
So, pardon the pun, but I’ve no truck with the lorry drivers and their testosterone-fuelled diesel demands. Their macho, bullying, London-blocking tactics on Monday left me as unmoved as the Park Lane traffic. Even for a profession not noted for its cerebral dexterity, bringing the capital to a standstill seemed an odd way to curry favour with the hard-pressed commuting masses. As a means calculated precisely to annoy, it was a Machiavellian masterstroke; as a prime example of big-end-for-brains logic, it couldn’t have been bettered. After all, it’s hardly going to make any of us love them more next time they jack-knife all over the M25, obligingly share their loads with the rest of the North Circular, lose control down a hill and plunge into the village greengrocer’s, or Trojan horse another load of illegal immigrants through Dover harbour. Personally, I rather hope they will be driven to the RNs and Autobahns of abroad.
I, for one, won’t miss them. And it’s a fair bet the Chancellor won’t either – who’s to say, after all, that his cunning fuel hike isn’t some long-harboured revenge for some ten-wheeled, five-axled Knightmare of the Road cutting him up on the Fife bypass? Lorries are filthy, dangerous and destructive. They’re environmentally insupportable, spewing out greenhouse gases that add to global warming, and should be replaced by rail freight.
Culturally, they’re a disaster. Not only because of the arguments about ancient villages vibrated to rubble. No, the damage wrought by trucking culture goes further still. Look at what they’ve done to our service stations, for instance. Just as City restaurants reflect the prevailing old-school culture with fishcakes, gymslips and custard, cafes the length of the M1 reflect the truck-driver’s devotion to brown tray cuisine – greasy burgers, tepid beans and bread-stuff bangers. The decor, like the food, is firmly stuck in the seventies, with acres of grubby, scruffy orange and brown. And that’s just the staff outfits.
Then there are the destructive inroads that lorries have made into popular culture. Among the many ghastly phenomena of the seventies were the large number of novelty singles. You know the ones – “Brand New Combine Harvester”, “Funky Moped” . . . and “Convoy”. A quarter- century of itsy-bitsy polka-dot bikinis and Barbie Girls has failed to challenge the supremacy of that toe-curling dirge, released in 1974, in which the refrain “Pigpen, this here’s a rubber duck and I’m going to put the hammer down” not only irritated the hell out of anyone listening, but also single-handedly brought into being that other great carbuncle on the backside of seventies culture, CB radio.
“Convoy” was a song about trucking. CB radios were (and are) what truckers use to communicate. But, much like the trucks it celebrated, the lorry movement didn’t stop there. Once the bandwagon really got moving, a convoy of ghastly lorry films swayed and thundered in its slipstream, scattering Burt Reynolds and a clutch of assorted toupees onto screens all over the globe.
The trucking community never really got over this. Being celebrated everywhere from Hollywood to the hit parade gave them a certain swaggering arrogance. They believe theirs is a God-given right to get their own way, whether it be the middle lane of the M6 or the Chancellor’s Budget. They got above themselves and the rest of us can go to hell in a Honda Civic.
A year or so ago, an intriguing report emerged in which it was claimed that hot truck cabins overheated drivers’ genitalia and made them impotent. And certainly, there is more than a hint of sexual frustration in the way truckers thunder along with their loads of pizzas and oven chips, girls’ names painted on their fuselage like the bomber pilots they obviously think they are. It’s our own fault, though – standing by as men with brains in their bottoms take sole charge of juggernauts the size of double-decker buses is like letting Saddam Hussein stay at the head of his army.
It’s high time lorry drivers were taken down a rig or two.
Wendy Holden’s novel, “Simply Divine”, is published by Headline, £10
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