Your coffee mug is a personality test
Everyone has a favourite mug, and everyone gets strangely upset when somebody else uses it.
KA
Kenji Arai
Food and home
Filed under
Home
Plants, mugs, walls and moving day. How to make a rented room feel like yours.
The short version
1
Everyone has a favourite mug, and a rule about it.
2
Readers fall into four kinds of mug people.
3
The real test is how you feel when someone uses yours.
Open any office kitchen cupboard and you will find the same cast. The joke mug from a holiday. The chipped mug nobody will throw away. The handsome handmade mug that everyone wants and nobody admits to wanting. And somewhere at the back, the mug from a conference in 2014 that somehow has outlived three office moves.
We asked readers about their favourite mugs last month and got over four hundred replies. The results were not scientific, but they were very revealing.
You can tell more about a household from the mug cupboard than from the bookshelf.
The four mug people
The loyalist: one mug, every day, for years. Will wash it rather than use another.
The collector: a different mug for every mood, chosen with care each morning.
The pragmatist: whatever is clean. Genuinely does not understand the question.
The guardian: owns a mug nobody else is allowed to touch, and will know if they did.
Most of us are a mix. But nearly everyone who replied had one mug they would be sad to break, and almost every one of those mugs came with a story: a gift, a trip, a person.
That is the real test. Not which mug you use, but which one you would save in a fire. Mine is plain white, slightly too small, and was left behind by a friend who moved abroad. I have never asked for her to take it back.
From the camera roll
Mine. Hands off.
For guests only
The office cupboard, sorted
“You can tell more about a household from the mug cupboard than from the bookshelf.”
— Kenji Arai
Reader mail
Letters about this post.
“My flatmate uses my mug to annoy me. It works.”
“Fourteen mugs. One gets used.”
“Bought a mug with my name on it. Still gets borrowed.”
KA
Written by
Kenji Arai
Kenji writes about late-night cooking and the objects we get attached to. His ramen advice has been tested on at least one night-shift nurse.
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