I’m just so incredibly desperate to break the writer’s block I’m going to keep a jokey promise I made to Debi Linton a week ago. The promise was to write about mug bonding. You know, the phenomenon where a mug – which is at the end of the day is nothing more than an inanimate receptacle – ends up becoming something precious and personal. Why do we bond with mugs in this way? Why is there such an appalling taboo against using other people’s mugs? I mean, if it’s clean it’s clean… is there some Darwinian advantage to establishing a bond of trust with our beloved day to day crockery?
So I present to you my 3 favourite mugs and 2 mugs I just refuse to drink out of. I really am that stuck for things to write about. Please, please, please don’t waste your time reading this.
A cheapo mug from Tesco this, but it wins by virtue of it’s sheer capacity. Typically large mugs suffer rapid heat loss due to the larger surface area of tea exposed to the air. This mug uses height to achieve the additional capacity, without losing heat any more rapidly than a normal mug. The Vin Diesel of Tea receptacles.
A genuine BBC mug, this is stolen and officially does not belong to me. Yet, through the magic of mug bonding, it’s sort of become mine by default. The BBC mug boasts much thicker ceramic, thus earning itself the title of Best Heat Retaining Mug. Your tea stays hot for longer with the BBC. Plus it’s got a BBC logo on it and I’m still enough of a sad little nobody to think that’s kinda neat.
Here I have no idea why I like this mug. Perhaps it’s the spooky frog head. Perhaps it’s the dark blue. Perhaps it’s the thickness of the ceramic (this is no cheap corporate tat)? I honestly don’t know, but yet another stolen mug becomes mine through ‘getting in their first’ and bonding with it, although I avoid using this one unless there’s only Bad Mugs left. This may be the nearest thing to a genuinely shared mug in Gore Towers.
It never ceases to amaze me that there’s still people who think buying people age inappropriate presents is funny. This is why I very nearly sent this mug to one of my brothers as a Christmas present but thought better of it. It lives in my cupboard, and despite being a perfectly acceptable mug I just will not drink out of it. First it says, “Gran” which is off-putting in itself, but it’s the “Pots of Love” tag-line that brings out the full nausea. It’s from the delicate school of crockery – I find that it’s unable to retain heat, I burn my hand on it, and it doesn’t actually hold enough tea to justify the effort of brewing up in the first place.
No. Just… no. The sheer horribleness of this mug is enough to put even this most hardened and enthusiastic tea drinker off her tea. When there’s only this and the Gran mug left, that’s when the Fairy washing up liquid comes out. Just no.Update: I’m at work so I’m going to steal a few minutes to add this:
If we had dæmons in this universe, this would be mine. It’s part of my soul – my work mug. A classic of the work mug genre, it features a pithy joke that expresses a feature of my own personality, and boy does this one do exactly that. It was a present, bought by someone who saw it and ‘thought of me.’ It has excellent heat retention and enjoys a fairly generous capacity. It’s also mine and anyone else drinking from it would suffer scary wrath.You all know this is heading towards me selling mugs don’t you? 
