When snow hits the county, it’s time for these council drivers to earn their salt. Adam Wakelin spent a freezing night with one of them – on a gritter lorry

It's 11.35pm. Beyond bitter. Well past parky as slithers of jagged snow start to swirl in the freezing air. "Jesus, it's cold!" says Mick Lawson, blowing out clouds of frosted breath as he clomps across a council depot yard that sparkles with the diamond dust of fine ice crystals.

Snow settling on ice. The worst possible combination. Just what he doesn't need.

You absolutely wouldn't want to be out on the roads in this, but we will be – again – once Mick's refilled the wagon.

Mick will slip-slide his loaded 17-tonne lorry through 70-odd miles of treacherous highways and byways tonight – with the Mercury riding shotgun.

And, believe you me, someone should pin a gold star to his city council sweatshirt for even attempting it.

Like Marshall Rooster Cogburn, Mick's a man with grit. True grit.

The lorry's already tried to do a twirl on the ice twice – and we've only been out an hour-and-a-half.

Right now, Mick is one of the most important men in Leicester.

Without him and the three other gritters who are working tonight, this city would be frozen solid by tomorrow.

Mind you, it still might.

Mick's boss Tom Vesty frowns at the sky.

The weather's getting worse, and Tom's beginning to wonder if he shouldn't have started the shift an hour earlier.

He smiles a rueful smile that says "what can you do?"

The forecast we looked at on his office computer a couple of hours ago predicted these snow flurries, but not so soon.

Gritting, like telling a good joke, is all about timing.

Put the salt down too soon and it might get washed away. Leave it too late and the snow steals a march.

With four gritters at his disposal and nearly 190 miles of roads to cover, the council's winter services duty officer has to play his cards pretty carefully.

If Leicester shudders to a rush-hour standstill, we'll all be screaming blue murder.

And Tom and Mick will be the ones we blame – not the weathermen or the fact it might have started snowing hard when the traffic was bumper-to-bumper and the gritters couldn't get through.

"You need to get ahead of the weather", says Tom. "That's the secret."

So far they have been.

Forward-thinking Leicester bought 2,640 tonnes of salt in April, and its reserves are considerably higher than many other comparable local authorities.

Will it be enough to see us through a long winter? Tom hopes so, but the five-day weather forecast on his computer doesn't indicate a thaw any time soon.

Far from it – the screen is stacked with red warning boxes.

Like everywhere else, we're at the mercy of the elements. You can only spend so much of the council budget on salt, and there's only so much storage space.

"I think we've got good resilience, but you never know," says Tom.

At 9pm, data coming in from the council's weather monitoring station in St Margaret's Way showed a road surface temperature of -2.9C. It feels at least a couple of degrees colder as we climb back into Mick's cab and head out again.

The council grits all "primary routes" – which are the main roads, bus lanes, outside schools, hospital car parks and a lot more stringy-straggly side streets than you might imagine.

When he's not gritting, Mick spends his night shifts clearing road gulleys and drains. He doesn't mind the snow. It brings a bit of variety, he says, as we work our way through three bags of sweets.

Mick normally just has the radio for company. How lucky he is then to have my constant questions and Tom's incessant crunching to break the monotony of a route he knows like the back of his hand.

"Yeah, lucky me," laughs the 54-year-old, sounding like a man who's beginning to miss his fix of Smooth FM.

Just as we're getting comfortable, the lorry's back wheels go AWOL on a patch of ice. We're travelling horizontally.

Mick manages the skid, but it's getting dicey. The concrete roads on some of the estates are Cresta Runs.

"Concrete's the absolute worst for ice," he says.

"What people don't realise is that we're always driving into the worst of it. No-one's gritted the roads for us, obviously."

We're travelling at between 20mph and 30mph. It feels faster, but our driver obviously knows what he's doing.

If anything, the conditions are deteriorating now. Snow flings itself at the windscreen, turning the outside world to TV static.

A motorcyclist squeezes past us and is now trying to use his feet for brakes, Flintstones-style, as a roundabout rears up out of nowhere.

"Look at that," says Mick, shaking his head. No further comment is needed.

It's not the snow and ice you really need to worry about, he reckons. It's the idiots.

What's the best way to drive in conditions like this? I wonder.

"Cautiously," he smiles. "I've already lost the back end a couple of times, but I know the roads. I know what's okay and what's not okay.

"A lot of people don't know how to drive in snow. They're afraid of it. They keep hitting the brakes because they're scared and that's not a good thing to do."

Taxi drivers are the worst, he says. Being stuck behind a lumbering gritter lorry is not where they want to be, so they try all manner of risky overtaking manoeuvres.

Not tonight, though. Tonight feels like a Christmas night. There's almost no traffic. Nearly every home is in darkness too.

Even Mick, who's spent 17 winters doing this job, can rarely remember it being this quiet.

We're starting to see more foxes than motorists – and that's not helpful.

An unspoken truth is that, actually, the gritters need a few foolhardy souls to venture out on a night like this. Their cars "work the salt into the road" and help it to melt snow and ice more effectively.

The council does the bulk of its gritting at night. That's when it tends to be coldest, and it also gives the drivers a relatively clear run. They couldn't cover all those miles in the busy daylight hours.

All that makes perfect sense, but it's not good PR.

"People often ring us up to complain that they've not seen a gritter," says Tom. "Well, no, you haven't because we've been out while you've been in bed."

You can't fault their work ethic. Mick will have worked 10 nights on the trot by the time he next gets a break.

It's 1.30am now and Tom is starting to relax.

Things are getting noticeably better. The snow is easing and, as we double-back on ourselves to grit the other sides of roads, black tarmac is beginning to re-emerge. The salt is doing its stuff.

Tomorrow, at least, shouldn't be too bad.

"Hopefully," says Tom. "But you never know what's around the corner in this job."