I Worked as a Mechanic Through 23 Nights Without a Secure Home. The Hard Part Wasn’t Just Finding Somewhere to Sleep. Every Morning, I Had to Make the Night Disappear Before I Went to Work.
Before daylight, the promenade was still mostly empty, which gave me time to turn the car back into a car.
For those first five nights, the car was my bedroom. The first night I stayed reclined in the driver’s seat. After that, most nights I slept across the back seat with a sheet over it and whatever I needed arranged around me. By morning, all of that had to disappear.
The sheet was folded and pushed into a seat pocket. Bags went back into the boot or footwells. Shoes found their place. Anything that suggested somebody had slept there was packed away. A few minutes earlier it had been a bedroom. By the time the first dog walkers passed, it was just a large car parked beside the sea.
Nothing important had changed — only the visible part.
That became the rhythm of those first days: wake up, hide the evidence, find somewhere to wash, change clothes and go to work.
I was working full time as a mechanic near Bristol, UK. I had a car, a phone, cameras, clean work clothes and somewhere people expected me to be every working day. From the outside, those things made me look settled. They also gave me more things to manage.
What a Home Does for You
A home quietly does an enormous amount of work for you. Water comes from a tap. Clothes live in cupboards. There’s usually a socket close enough to the bed that you can charge your phone without thinking about it. The bathroom stays in the same place. You can put something down on a chair and be reasonably confident it’ll still be there when you come back.
Once I lost that, ordinary life broke into separate jobs.
Water had to be found, containers filled and carried. Clean clothes had to be protected from everything else in the car. Dirty clothes needed somewhere to go. Food had to survive the heat and fit around whatever I could cook. My phone needed charging because it was also my map, email, bank, housing search, and connection to anyone who might help. The camera batteries needed charging too.
Nothing could simply be left until later because later might be somewhere else.
Public toilets became useful very quickly. Before work, I’d wash as well as I could at a sink, brush my teeth with bottled water and change inside the car under a sheet. Portbury services filled in the gaps when I needed more than a sink could offer. I could shower there and use the laundrette when my clothes needed washing.
I got good at knowing which bag held what: wash kit, work clothes, clean underwear, chargers. If something ended up in the wrong box, it wasn’t a disaster, but before sunrise it could feel like one.
There’s something absurd about trying to wash properly in a public toilet while people come in, use the urinal, and leave without giving you a second look. I was doing something completely ordinary in the least ordinary way I’d ever done it.
Then I’d put on my work clothes.
The uniform mattered more than I expected. Once I was dressed for work, I looked like myself again, or at least the version of myself everyone else recognised. The same trousers. The same boots. The same workshop waiting for me.
A pay slip doesn’t show where you slept the night before. Neither does a clean shirt.
At work, the cars already booked in didn’t care what had happened outside the workshop. I still had to diagnose faults, remove seized bolts, service vehicles and put other people’s cars safely back on the road.
Mechanical problems were almost comforting because they normally had causes. Something was broken, worn, loose, leaking, or badly designed. You inspected it, tested it, and worked through the problem until the answer appeared.
Housing was nothing like that.
Outside work, my head was running through campsites, water, laundry, battery percentages, calls, emails, money, and where I could safely leave everything. Inside the workshop, I still needed to remember which bolt had come from where. For a while, I could keep the two apart.
When the System Started to Fail
Then I spent too long fighting with a lower suspension arm on a Ford Focus.
It was a shit design, but I’d dealt with shit designs before. This one got to me. I got angrier than the job deserved and eventually threw a hammer. It bounced harmlessly off a tyre.
Throwing tools is generally considered poor diagnostic procedure.
Nobody was hurt, but it was the first obvious sign that whatever system I’d built was starting to fail. I’d been treating work as the part of my life homelessness couldn’t reach. My concentration had other ideas.
A mechanic can’t safely be half present. You need to notice when something feels wrong, remember what you’ve removed, and know when frustration has started making decisions for you. The car goes back onto the road afterward.
I knew I couldn’t keep forcing myself through shifts, so I used the rest of my annual leave. I hated that. Work was money, but it was also routine, one of the few places where I still knew exactly what my role was. I could turn up, pick up my tools, and be useful. Losing even that for a while felt like giving homelessness more territory.
After work came the other shift.
Going home is such an ordinary phrase that I’d never really thought about what it contains. For most people around me, the end of the working day meant leaving. For me, leaving the workshop meant working out what the evening required before I could sleep.
Sometimes it was laundry.
One of the photographs that later became important to No Fixed Address was made at the Ramada laundrette at Portbury services. It isn’t a dramatic picture. It shows washing, which is exactly why I like it.
Work still expected clean clothes. Homelessness hadn’t canceled laundry. I still needed trousers, underwear, T-shirts and socks that didn’t smell like a car or a tent. The washing machine didn’t care whether I had a tenancy agreement.
Other evenings were about charging things, buying food, refilling water or simply finding somewhere to exist until it was late enough to sleep. That last part surprised me.
If you’ve got a home, you can waste time at home. You can sit on the sofa, make tea, stare at your phone, watch something bad on television and achieve absolutely nothing. Without one, dead time becomes another practical problem.
You can only sit in a supermarket car park for so long before you start feeling conspicuous. Cafes close. Shops close. The car gets hot. The phone battery keeps going down. You start measuring places by how long you can reasonably stay there without having to buy something or explain yourself.
I spent a lot of time trying not to look like I was waiting for the day to end.
After five nights, I recovered my camping equipment and moved onto a campsite. It was easier. Homelessness can get easier without the basic problem actually being solved.
The tent gave me somewhere I could leave bedding during the day. There were showers and toilets on site. I had more space. I could cook without balancing everything around a car seat. For a while, it almost felt organised.
Work shoes and bottles of water inside the tent. Water had to be found, carried and stored rather than simply taken from a tap. Photo by Sam Singleton
The tent developed its own domestic logic. Clean clothes stayed in one place. Toiletries, gas, batteries and small essentials lived in clear plastic boxes. Work shoes sat beside trainers. Water containers had their corner. The camping table became kitchen, bathroom shelf and desk depending on the hour. After a few days, I knew where everything belonged.
That made life easier. It didn’t make it a home.
Everything still had to be portable. Every object had to justify the space it took up because eventually the entire room had to fit back into the car.
On the final morning at the campsite, I packed it down in stages. Sleeping gear first, then clothes and boxes, then the poles and fabric. The tent became smaller and smaller until it stopped being a room and became equipment again.
When it was gone, a darker rectangle of grass remained where it had stood.
For a couple of weeks, that patch of ground had contained a bed, clothes, food, cameras, work things, rubbish, receipts and the private parts of my life. Then there was almost nothing to show it had ever been there.
I photographed that, too.
For me, it wasn’t invisible because nothing was happening, but because so much work went into making the evidence temporary.
Photography brought its own problems. A camera was another valuable thing to protect from rain, heat, and theft, and the batteries still had to be charged. I was already carrying too much. I kept photographing anyway.
At first, the pictures were evidence to myself. The car had become a bedroom. The tent existed. I was carrying water. I was washing clothes at a service station because they still needed washing. These things had happened, and I wanted a record.
Then the photographs began to change. The ordinary details started to matter more than the dramatic ones: a sheet folded into a seat pocket, work boots beside an airbed, a towel and flannel laid out on a camping table, chargers and toiletries packed into a clear box, laundry going round in a machine while I waited.
Much of my homelessness looked more like admin than crisis. That’s part of why it could stay hidden.
Housing Isn’t an Appearance
I was fortunate in ways that matter. I had a car. I stayed employed. I had money coming in, people who believed me, and enough practical ability to build systems around the situation. My experience lasted 23 nights, not years.
Those advantages didn’t make me housed. They made it easier for other people not to notice that I wasn’t.
We still tend to recognise homelessness by what we can see. Someone sleeping in a doorway is easy to recognise as homeless. Someone arriving at work in uniform, carrying tools and complaining about a badly designed lower arm doesn’t fit the picture.
But housing isn’t an appearance.
For those 23 nights, the difference between looking homeless and looking ordinary was often a few minutes of work before sunrise.
Fold the sheet. Move the bags. Wash. Change. Charge the phone. Keep the work clothes clean. Put everything back where nobody can see it.
Then go to work.
By the time anyone saw me, the bedroom had disappeared.
