The traffic officers getting people to Christmas dinner
Although Jason and Nicola Cook are unable to spend Christmas with their three daughters and seven grandchildren this year, they will be together. In fact, they’ll be side-by-side for the whole day, driving up and down part of the M25.
Both traffic officers with Highways England, their patch includes the Channel tunnel, the M25 and the A2, with an outstation in Dartford. Nicola had been working at the Dartford branch for a year before Jason joined in May 2006 and, as they put it, the magic happened.
“We kind of did our courting whilst sitting next to each other in a car, getting to know each other – like finding out whether she liked marmite,” says Jason. “You do that kind of chatting when you’re eight hours sitting in car together in the middle of the night.”
Highways England deploys staff 24 hours a day to deal with incidents on the country’s core road network and distributes information about preparing for winter driving for example. Jason and Nicola, both members of Prospect, the trade union for professionals, describe their role as a safety patrol, dealing with minor accidents, routine breakdowns and drivers who have got lost. They hand over serious incidents to police or ambulance services.
There won’t be many lorries on the roads on 25 December, but the roads won’t be completely empty, according to Jason, like they were when he was a child. Instead, there’ll be carloads of families and presents and people getting lost or stuck on their way to Christmas dinner. Nicola and Jason spent a previous Christmas Day leading an elderly lady to the right junction after she’d accidentally ended up on the motorway and had got lost on her way to see her grandchildren in Tunbridge Wells.
They have both worked on Christmas Day several times before and always try to synchronise their schedules during the festive season. They don’t mind it too much, says Nicola. “At Christmas everyone is jollier – even if they’ve broken down they tend to realise you’re doing your utmost to help them.”
The technicians keeping the power on
Dean Mannion might be wearing his Christmas jumper this 25 December, but there’s a serious burden placed on his shoulders: if he doesn’t turn up for work, the UK could experience a blackout.
He’s an assistant shift manager for Dinorwig power station, a hydroelectric plant in Snowdonia national park, north Wales, which is one of the big plants feeding energy into the grid.
Mannion spends most of his time in the control room, liaising closely with a team at National Grid that monitors Britain’s electricity system and asks power stations such as Dinorwig to divert more energy into the grid should it need it to stabilise.
“It might literally be 10 seconds notice to change something,” says Mannion – so he’ll need to be alert throughout the night, with a shift starting at 8pm on Christmas Day. A Christmas tipple is not an option. “I’d hate to be the one to interrupt Her Majesty’s speech cos all the power’s gone off cos I’ve nodded off in the control room.”
If something goes wrong – a valve not opening properly, perhaps, or an electrical or computer failure – there’s a team of technicians on hand to conduct repairs. The plant won’t be doing any complex work during over Christmas and Mannion, who has worked there for 26 years, just hopes to “keep the plates spinning” without any major incidents.
His three children (the youngest is nine) are disappointed that he’ll be out for the evening and asleep for much of the day but, he says, “it’s a sacrifice somebody has to make. I don’t think the country would be happy to turn off all the power for a few hours.”
The police officers responding to emergency calls
While many families sit around in their paper hats arguing over a game of charades, throughout the night of 25 and 26 December police officer Adam Norton will be standing by to deal with the more extreme family fallouts. A response sergeant in Runcorn, Cheshire, he’ll be responding to 999 calls and other urgent issues – and says that although the pubs shut early, violence often ensues when people spend all day drinking.
Many of his back-office colleagues won’t be working, but the rest of the police service will need to run at its usual capacity: demand on frontline staff is exacerbated by the fact that so many people are celebrating on the same day.
It’ll be a real wrench being away from his wife and three kids, but Norton says he’s grateful to associate Christmas with happy memories when his job brings him into contact with so many people for whom it’s difficult time of year.
“Last Christmas I spent my morning with an individual who was suicidal, taking them through to hospital to get support from mental health services,” he says. The festive period sees a rise in incidents related to depression, alcohol, loneliness and domestic violence.
“It’s very, very sad, but it’s good that we’re there for these people. For some people it might be the only friendly face they see on Christmas Day,” he says. “Although it might not be the Christmas any of us had hoped for, we sort of improved it very slightly, the best we can.”
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