Some people never get the evening off.

This paper is built on a simple idea: the time after work stops. The evening that's yours. What you do with it when no one's paying you for it.

For a lot of people, that evening never comes. Around 600 people a day in Britain give up their job to look after someone — a parent, a partner, a child who can't manage alone (Carers UK). Roughly 1.7 million are doing fifty hours a week or more. There's no clocking off at seven. The work is still there at nine, at midnight, at three in the morning when they're up again.

I won't pretend I know how that feels. I don't. I'm the one with the free evening, writing about the free evening — if I tried to tell you what their night is like, I'd be making it up, and they'd know.

So I'll just notice them. Tonight, while some of us decide what to do with an hour that's ours, someone a few streets away is halfway through a shift that doesn't end and was never on anyone's payslip. No evening. No hour that's theirs. Just the next thing that needs doing — and them, still there to do it.