He’s not unusual, and that’s the point. A researcher who studies the invisibility of night work has called this kind of labour essential to keeping a 24-hour society running, even in sectors still, unfairly, labelled “low-skilled”. The system depends entirely on people like Joseph being willing to do work that is physically exhausting, emotionally heavy and almost invisible – and depends on them not being seen doing it.

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I know this because the toll is mine too. Night shifts change you in ways that are hard to explain to someone who’s never worked one. The building itself changes shape after dark – the dining hall shutters, the kitchen goes quiet, and there’s no lunch or supper laid out the way there is for the day staff. You eat whatever you brought, standing up between rounds, or you don’t eat properly at all. 

You learn to read a room by the sound of breathing. You learn which silences are peaceful and which ones aren’t. You learn to hold someone’s hand at 3am when they’re frightened of a memory they can’t quite place, and to still be steady enough by 7am to hand over a clear, calm report to the day staff arriving fresh and rested. I’ve walked out into a bright, ordinary morning – commuters, dog walkers, a school run – feeling like a ghost passing through a world that has no idea what just happened. Even after sleeping a full day, the tiredness doesn’t fully leave. It sits behind your eyes. 

There’s a strange loneliness to it, too. You do the hardest, most tender parts of the job while almost no one is watching. There’s no manager doing rounds at 4am. No family members dropping by unannounced to see how their mother is really cared for. Just you, the resident, and whatever the night brings. Some of my colleagues have told me they were sleeping in cars between split shifts, or sending most of what they earn home and living on very little themselves. 

And yet I don’t think any of us who do this work would call it thankless, exactly. There’s a particular kind of privilege in being the person someone reaches for in the dark. It’s just that the country runs on this invisible labour without much acknowledging it exists, and with visa rules tightening, the workforce holding it up is being asked to prove its worth to a government that rarely watches it work.

Next month, Joseph will board a plane and come home with three children who have only ever known him through a phone screen at odd hours. He’s already planned the first thing he’ll cook them. I think about that a lot – how much of what holds this care system together is built from small, patient sacrifices nobody claps for. Not applause. Just the next shift, and the one after that. 

Bimal Devkota is a senior care assistant in Farnham, Surrey, and author of the memoir The Universe in Her Eyes, drawn from his years working in elderly care

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