Walking Through Bethnal Green I Thought About the Strait of Hormuz and Also About My Gas Bill
Jack Handey, East London, on the Iran war’s inflation reach, the Hormuz chokepoint, and very good samosas
By Jack Handey for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Deep Thoughts, Bethnal Green, mid-April
Sometimes, when I am walking through Bethnal Green and I pass the kebab shop and I see the new price board which I check every Thursday the way ship navigators checked stars, as a fixed point by which to measure drift I think about the Strait of Hormuz. Not because the kebab shop has a sign about the Strait of Hormuz. It does not. It has a sign about the lamb wrap. But the price of the lamb wrap connects to the price of fuel which connects to the supply chain which connects, eventually, to twenty-one miles of water in the Persian Gulf through which twenty percent of the world’s oil passes.
This is what globalisation actually means, lived at street level in E2. It means that a ceasefire described as “very fragile” by a Chinese foreign minister affects the cost of a Thursday lamb wrap in Bethnal Green. The wrap is now £1.20 more than it was in January. January feels like a different geopolitical era. It mostly was.
The East End Reading of Distant Events
People in Bethnal Green do not spend a lot of time talking about the Strait of Hormuz by name. They talk about energy bills. They talk about the shop prices. They talk about whether it is worth getting the van out for a job that pays the same as last year but costs more in diesel to get to. These are the same conversation as the Strait of Hormuz conversation. They are just in a different language, which is the language of people for whom geopolitics arrives as a bill rather than a briefing.
I had a samosa from the market and thought about this. It was a very good samosa. According to BBC Business, UK inflation remains elevated. The samosa was worth it. The Hormuz situation was less clearly worth it. I finished the samosa and moved on.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
