Ali, Whitecross Market
Ali is initially reticent to talk, but the showman within compels him to leave the canopy and open his lips, if only for a cigarette.
A standard day is 7am to 3pm. He preps and washes the salad, collects ingredients from a cash and carry. All very routine for this Kurdish business owner, a former political refugee and now British citizen.
Money is forefront of many of his answers. His favourite aspect of the job is the money, busy periods. He dislikes rain, Mondays and Fridays, all of which keep people at home and away from his business. “Fridays are shit”. He doesn’t ask his staff to come in outside of midweek, “its not worth the rent”.
Presciently, he sold many of his former establishments in 2019. “Corona killed all of us”, he says of the pandemic. But he senses business is better than it was last year, and hopes it might restore in the next five years, though doesn’t like thinking too much about the future.
Another change he has noticed is the way people pay. Historically he might take 80% of his £2500 weekly takings by cash, but today he is lucky to get £20 in cash.
“They want to chip us” he says, unclear on who they is referring to. He intimates paying for the bus by lowering his forehead to the imaginary oyster card reader, perhaps bowing to the overlords he seems to think are behind this.
It seems that the pandemic has had an impact on Ali’s trust of the very state that offered him citizenship, including him in the society he now wants to opt out of “If you don’t pay your bus fare they find you instantly, but if you get stabbed, they never find you”.