jack's business life

The A11 is Jack's road. Jack: motorway magnate, foodsmith, automotive entrepreneur, chancer of the East Anglian traffic, a last man of foresight, his business acumen sparkling as a beacon in the dreary hum of engines.

Who is Jack? Does he sit in relish of the fearsome entrepreneurial talents that gave him his dual-sided (north/south) monopoly of the roadways? Does he sit in his home, bible-thin stretched striped polo shirts and unbranded jeans and weathered Reebok’s, and feel content? Has he made it in life? Jack, have you made it?

His two businesses stand like monuments to a better time. The southbound carriage proffers ‘Jack’s Mobile Barbershop’, a motor home or passenger coach converted into a low-end hair salon for the commuting gentleman. I can only imagine its inside, a sink somehow rigged to a refillable barrel of tepid water, half-rusted scissors and tired clippers sat alone on a folding Formica topped table, clippers – they work so slowly – hooked up to a generator, car battery, or even just a few AAs for ultimate mobility. There’d be an unwiped mirror and some ancient hair product, a funny cheap shampoo and the lingering stench of old tobacco and used burger napkins, all light left to a hanging mechanics bulb left strung up from the ceiling. And Jack would be there, waiting, hot in the grave-like air of the mobile barber shop, dirty and forever reused. Or not, for a man of Jack’s gravitas must have a workforce several strong. Or perhaps it thrives, the premises surrounded by silver Audis and Black BMWs and navy blue VW Passat’s, all with suit jackets hanging above their leather back seats, their balding salesman owners hitting the chair – an old car seat? a rickety kitchen chair? a bar stool? – for a hasty tidy up, torso’s thickset beneath M&S shirts of a three for £20 range, aching desperation in their still blue eyes. Jack’s Mobile Barber Shop: where the recession can’t reach! (all cuts still just £4.50). Their wisps of greying back and sides left like the scene of a death on the floor beneath them they go, then, forth to their meetings and their pitching’s without a hair out of place but with their souls in tatters, and they know that Jack’s life will never feel the disgusted strain of their own, and that their only link to the freedom of the mobile barbershop lies in the superfluous haircuts they allow themselves there, every Monday, every Friday, quiet days in sales, haircuts borne more out of the need for human contact than for another half centimetre of hair to be shed to the rubbish to the musical fanfare of local radio – Broadland, Radio Norwich. For these men, Jack is the last semblance of hope on their way to the degradation of work, one last human outpost in the alien world of medium-sized business techniques and expectations. Stripped of life by company targets and the small print of their JDs, they need Jack. The A11 is their bar, drowning their sorrows in Jack’s weak tea. Anything but: home, wife, child.

Moustachioed in my mind but be-stubbled in life, I expect regretfully, Jack must be a heavy man, his own hair a greasy black wedge, its loose clumped strands weighted away from the bulk by product and glistening across his expansive white forehead like the hands of a clock. Attractive once, I very much doubt, Jack would have taken his slight inheritance and – without a girl in his life – invested it in the future of business – mobile premises – assuring the continuity of his empire for the foreseeable. A Watton lad, where else but the A11? thinks Jack (then 25). “Norfolk’s only road!” he laughs. Fuck the other ‘big A’s’ (47, 17). It was always the A11 for Jack.

The barbershop appealed to the tragedian in Jack – it felt somehow French or even German (think [black & white] Wim Wenders). The real entrepreneurial flair came in his second commercial enterprise only months later. Called it ‘Jacksburger’ and used the – adapted – green logo of the weak UK lager Carlsberg. It was marketing genius the likes of which the northbound carriage had never – and will never – see again. With ‘Jacksburger’ came Jack’s monopoly. The A11 was his, every which possible way (just 2 ways). It was for the drivers, the men who drove for their lives just to get away from them, or for hungry working class families who won’t make it as far as Thetford’s retail park (“It’s a long way since Stansted”, goes Jack’s old jingle, self-recorded on a portable four-track and played over in the 80s tape-deck by the griddle, self-advertisement to the already converted) or Norwich’s city promise still an hour’s drive away. There’ll always be coffee waiting for them at Jacksburger, in Styrofoam cups with UHT milk at the cheapest price in Norfolk. This was pre-Starbucks, you understand, when coffee was something different, not to be enjoyed. A drink with a brown purpose. Gourmet coffee was a hilarious contradiction. £2 + for a cup of coffee? Not on Jack’s watch. His thick fingers proudly worked the griddle, burnt up on stray grease and fat from moving the frozen burgers and the sliced onions. He’d do it all for you, big blue plastic bags of buns piled up on the chest freezer behind him. He’d do bacon if you asked and if he had it – roll or sandwich. He had those cans of hot dog sausages in brine, big catering sized cans with big catering sized sausages, and he’d warm them up in a pan over a two-plate Calor Gas hob. They all loved it, even if they didn’t want to, on the plastic foldaway chairs by the A11. Jack had awnings if it rained, but the rain never put them off, not the hungry or the driving. Food changed but Jack remained constant, a formidable provider, and he’s still there in the northern carriages primary lay-by. It’s his road. People understand the work he’s done, the life he’s provided. There is love in Jacksburger, for the unloved of this world (or county). The same groomed salesmen – hair cut in the barbershop that same morning – stop for their dinner, another day closer to the end, burgers and chips from their surrogate lady, the circle of sweat in the centre of Jack’s polo shirt like the heart they long to love.

Jack, legitimate personage of the unrewarded public sector (!), how you do provide a service! Knight him this second, your majesty, for all he has done and will do again! Jack: living the rural English dream, drawing the solids of good business through every clogged pore! Resuscitating the death of the modernized man through untrained grooming and questionable foodstuffs! Stuff the products, it’s about the man (or rather: the Man). This is no simple man, no simple burger-pusher or hair-remover – this is Jack, Jack, Jack, the light of the A11, the hope for a better Norfolk!