I had occasion, on Saturday afternoon, to visit Rensler’s coffee house on Threadneedle Street — an establishment I have patronised for the better part of twenty years, and whose proprietor, Felix Rensler, has never once failed to greet me with the exact same words: “The usual, Mr. Pemberton?”

On this occasion, however, Rensler added a coda.

“The usual, Mr. Pemberton? Only it’ll be four florins now. Copper’s gone mad.”

I confess I did not immediately grasp the connection between copper and coffee, and I said as much. Rensler, who is not a man given to lengthy exposition, gestured vaguely eastward — toward, I eventually understood, the Kaelmar Strait, a body of water I could not have located on a map if my life depended upon it — and said: “Shipping. Everything costs more when the ships don’t move.”

And there, in the space between my usual chair and a cup of coffee that had mysteriously gained forty centimes, I found myself contemplating the great invisible web that connects all things.

The Price of Distance

We live, most of us, in blissful ignorance of supply chains. The bread on our table arrives from somewhere. The copper in our wiring was dug from the ground by someone. The coffee in our cups crossed an ocean in a ship that passed through a strait that two nations are currently arguing about with increasing volume and decreasing civility.

I do not pretend to understand the politics of the Kaelmar Strait, and I have no opinion on whether the Delvarian Empire or the Thessarine Confederation has the better claim to its waters. My colleague Mr. Wynn covers these matters with admirable rigour, and I commend his reporting to anyone seeking informed analysis.

What I can observe, from the vantage point of my usual chair at Rensler’s, is this: the world is rather more connected than we like to believe, and rather more fragile than we dare to admit.

Copper, Copper Everywhere

Consider the humble florin. It has been our currency for longer than anyone alive can remember, and we spend it freely on the assumption that its purchasing power will remain more or less constant from one week to the next. But the florin does not exist in isolation. It is tethered, by a thousand invisible filaments, to the price of copper, the cost of shipping, the stability of waterways through which our trade must pass.

When copper futures rose 14 per cent on the Bramblegate Exchange on Saturday, the number seemed abstract — a matter for traders and speculators. But copper is not abstract. Copper is the wiring in your walls, the pipes under your floors, the overhead cables of our beloved (and soon-to-be-expanded) tramway system. When copper becomes expensive, everything that uses copper becomes expensive. And everything uses copper.

I spoke with a plumber of my acquaintance — a solid, unflappable man named Doyle who has maintained the pipes in my building for a decade — and asked whether the copper situation concerned him.

“Concerned?” Doyle said. “I’ve had three customers cancel jobs this week because my material quotes went up. If this keeps on, I’ll be a philosopher instead of a plumber. Philosophers don’t need copper.”

The Tramway and the Strait

The most consequential intersection of copper and civic ambition is, of course, the Veridan Corridor Tramway Expansion, which the Council approved with such fanfare just last Thursday. The project’s 3.2-billion-florin budget was calculated on the assumption that copper would remain somewhere near its five-year average price. That assumption now looks optimistic.

I do not wish to alarm anyone unduly. Crises in distant straits have a way of resolving themselves, often through the simple mechanism of everyone involved realizing that war is unprofitable. The Delvarians are not fools, and the Thessarines are not reckless, and the copper will probably flow again before long.

But “probably” is doing a great deal of heavy lifting in that sentence.

What We Cannot Control

There is a particular anxiety that comes from realizing that the things you depend upon — your coffee, your tram, your plumber’s willingness to show up — are governed by forces entirely beyond your control, in places you have never been, by people you will never meet.

I do not have a remedy for this anxiety. I am a newspaper columnist, not a geopolitical strategist. But I will offer this small comfort: the anxiety itself is a sign of understanding, and understanding, however uncomfortable, is preferable to ignorance.

Rensler’s coffee is now four florins. It is still, I can report, excellent. The world may be fragile, but the coffee endures. Some mornings, that is enough.