Truck Driver

I run Truckers’ Toilets UK, a campaign to improve access to toilet facilities

for lorry drivers who have parking problems to contend with, as well as finding a loo.
Parking an HGV in a pub car park is not an option. In fact, there are very few suitable
truck stops available for our lorry drivers.

I used to drive up and down the country. It didn’t matter where, anywhere, all
the way up to Aberdeen, down to Devon, Kent. Because of drivers’ hours you have to
have a break every four and a half hours anyway so it depends where you’re driving.
Like if you’re driving up to Aberdeen it takes you nine hours to get there. You have to
have a break half way up anyway where you have to stop for 45 minutes and
sometimes you stop anywhere. If it gets to a point of desperation, 9 times out of 10
you’re always 10 miles from a services so you just end up parking in a lay-by and
going under the trailer for a pee usually. I don’t usually do the other one under the
trailer! I kind of draw the line somewhere. But no, I’ll go for a pee under my trailer,
I’m not bothered. Where the lorry connects to the trailer there’s like a gap of about
three feet where it’s like your own little cubicle going on. As long as you don’t park
in an open lay-by where you can see fields and houses for miles, you’re all right as
long as you’ve got trees down the side.

When I was little I used to do a lot of horse riding so kind of when you’re riding
across fields and you go for 20 miles or so, you’re going to need a pee. So I’m kind
of used to peeing out in the open. Some women drivers find it disgusting, they’re like
‘oh, I don’t know how you can do it’, but I mean I got stuck in the snow on the M25
once and I was sat 16 hours I think we were sat. It was about three, four years ago
now, four years ago and the whole of London and the M25 in Kent was just stopped
and you couldn’t get anywhere. I moved about a mile and a half and I got to the point
of about midnight, I’d been sat in the truck all day and I was like ‘oh God, I’m going
to have to piss’ but what am I going to do? So I ended up climbing between, because
I’ve got a trailer and I’d got a load, I climbed between the load and the unit, which is
like raised up but you’re less likely to be seen. I couldn’t pee under the trailer
because there’s cars down both sides so I just had to pee on the back of the lorry. It’s
disgusting but I can’t help it. You have to weigh up your options, like can I wait, can
I not? I try and get to a services because it’s not very hygienic is it?

But if you can’t then you just have to go if you have to go, sort of thing. There’s a
girl that I know, she has a tipper lorry and she’ll climb into the back of her tipper lorry
with a plastic bag and she’s not bothered at all, but I couldn’t do it. Where would you
wash your hands? Sometimes I make a little game out of it. As you drive down the
M40, the M40’s really boring and I think there’s about four services on the M40 and
they’re all about thirty miles apart so you get to the point where you think oh, I need a
wee, so you drive past one and you’re like ‘I reckon I could make it to the next one’
and then you get to the next one and you’re like ‘yeah, I reckon I can make it to the
next one’, because you don’t want to stop because it wastes so much time having to
go into the services and then you have to walk ten miles across to the lorry park. It’s
just boring.

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Truck Driver

I mean if I don’t have to bother, I don’t bother, because you only have a certain
amount of time in the day that you can work as a lorry driver. I mean our industry’s
the most restrictive industry you can go into. There’s so many rules and regulations,
like drivers’ hours, working hours, working time directive, but you have to stick to it
and for that you limit yourself and what you do is you go down the road. You just
have to keep going and get on with it. I got a bollocking off my mum once because
she said you shouldn’t hold it like that because it will make you have bladder issues.

A lot of my lorry driving girl friends are like my age so they haven’t got to the age yet
where it could cause a problem. So I don’t really know if it’s going to cause long term
problems or not. If they’re driving down the road they’ll piss anywhere. It’s a lot
easier for a man to pee in a bottle as well. I mean some bloke once suggested to me
and my mate that we got a she-wee it’s called. That’s like no, that’s just weird. Well
the problem with doing it as you’re driving down the road, men can pee in a bottle as
they drive. I mean no-one would ever know.

On most A roads there’s no toilets at all. I mean like even in Ashbourn, they’ve just
shut all the toilets. There used to be a toilet that you could park the lorry outside and
you could go to the toilet but they’ve shut that toilet now and moved them all into a
central location in town which means that there’s nowhere for a lorry driver to park to
go for a pee anymore. There’s one really good one that I know of as you go down the
A120 towards Colchester in Essex, they’ve got rest areas where they’ve got a block of
toilets that’s permanently open and it’s just like a big lay-by really but it’s got a block
of toilets on it so there’s enough room to park cars and lorries and everyone can go
and use the toilet. But most lay-bys you’ll find that there’s just a bit of dirt and quite a
lot of bottles of pee lying around.

I’ve done nights as well as days so like I’ve driven, I’ve started at 5 o’clock at night
and finished at 7 o’clock in the morning, so if you’re driving all night and the toilets
are still shut, where are you going to go for a pee then? My mate did that, on the
services down at Bristol, they wouldn’t let her in for a pee, she was desperate. She’d
got a water infection and the bloke wouldn’t let her in so she peed on his step of the
services, like outside the slidy doors, she peed there. If you give me a journey, say
like I was driving to Southampton, I could tell you every service station on the way
down because I’ve been to them all at some point!

There’s like a fifty mile gap but you know what it’s like, you can go from not needing
a pee to needing a pee in about five minutes. Shit, I’ve got fifty miles to cover now,
what am I going to do now? Not drink anymore. If you’re getting to the point where
you might need a wee and you know the services are twenty miles away, I won’t
drink anymore. I wish they’d put more toilets on lay-bys, just like one man and one
woman. Or just one unisex toilet would be fine, as long as it was cleaned daily
because men are disgusting. You want to see some of the places in some warehouses
and stuff that you go into where they have unisex toilets. They’re disgusting. Men are
just gross. I’m kind of immune to it now, like I’ll just hover. Either not touch it at all
or like if I have to touch it, I’ll use like a bit of toilet paper to move the seat or
whatever.

We have a WhatsApp group that’s got eight girly truckers on it and some of the
discussions we have on there, pretty random, but some girl put on Facebook a while

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back about how disgusting women lorry drivers were going for a pee under the trailer
and literally we had a field day with that. Stupid cow, she doesn’t drive very far to
not know that sometimes you have to go under your trailer and it’s kind of not really
an option. She’s a short distance driver whereas all my friends are long distance
drivers, so like there’s a difference. When you only drive twenty miles a day it’s not
very hard. You never get to the point where you’re utterly desperate for a wee but
like when you do four to five hundred miles a day you can get to the point where you
need a wee.

I tend not to bother to go to places where I know people in pubs, if they catch you
going in and you’re not actually buying anything then they’ll chuck you out anyway.
Most cafes are the same so I don’t tend to go to those places where they’re likely to
chuck you out because it’s a waste of your time to go and then them to kick you out
and then you think shit, I’ve got to find somewhere else. It’s easier just to go
somewhere where you know where you’re going and you know you’re not going to
have a problem. I’ve had – we pre-laid a lot of straw and I ended up peeing behind
straw bales and the farmers moving them as you’re trying to pee behind them. Most
places don’t see many female lorry drivers so they don’t tend to get used to it because
men, as I say, they will piss anywhere. I mean some people are a bit funny about
where they go to the loo so doing long distance lorry driving is probably not for them
because you have to get used to going into disgusting places. Over the years these
stories repeat themselves so there's never really any further it can go other than peeing
under your trailer, peeing on a service station step, a girl having a fit about women
peeing under trailers, but that’s about it. Them women always come along that have
got a problem with that sort of thing but they’ve never actually experienced what it’s
like to need a pee so badly that you’ve got to pee under your trailer.