First World Problems

White Cups

As a kid, dreaming of what life would be in my own house, I always imagined having French Doors out to the garden and matching cups in my kitchen. All the stylish houses on TV had matching cups out of which to drink, set down on a gorgeous tables for coffee in the afternoon. Matching, if possibly, but really just the same colour, if not the same shape. You know, smart people’s kitchens have gorgeous cups that match. Really stylish kitchens had cups that didn’t exactly match, but matched all the same.

Of course, when I first moved out of home I just took the odds and sods that my mum could dig out from the back of the cupboard. I remember they were those orange, glass-looking mugs – I just googled them and they are called Fire King Peach Luster Coffee Mugs – and those brown and tan mugs –I just googled them and they are called Vintage Stoneware Mugs – from which I drank my instant coffee. They are probably all very collectable now a days, but I hated them at the time, but I was a poor uni student, what could I do.

I dreamt about having a cupboard of identical white coffee mugs. Stylish, matching mugs. Funny the things you think.

Flat mates came and flat mates went and coffee mugs of varying sizes and, more importantly, colours, just naturally accumulated in my kitchen cupboard.

Oh, to be one of those smart people who have matching coffee mugs to offer their guests?

My cup cupboard more often than not resembled an opportunity shop of deplorables.

Life got in the way, mortgages, parties, men and the like, and my cup cupboard remained something of which to be silently ashamed.

Fast forward a few years, and I was shopping in Sunbury for something, or other, for the house at Bolago and there was a home ware shop having a closing down sale and out the front was a table of sale item mugs, on which was a plethora of white coffee mugs all for $1 each. So, to fix the long standing problem once and for all, fulfil a dream, I bought fifteen mugs. I remember being really pleased with myself.

Yes, okay, this wasn’t some great lifetime goal achieved, not at all, but it did give me a warm fuzzy feeling that I remember well.

The nice shop assistant wrapped each one carefully in newspaper for me and I put them in my car to take home to Melbourne when I left Bolago at the end of the weekend.

When I got back to Fitzroy, I took the package out of my car and unwrapped them enthusiastically only to see that the 15 white coffee cups I had bought were, in fact, lemon in colour. A very pale lemon, but lemon none the less. I was amazed by this, how could I get this so wrong. It was as though somebody had changed them without me noticing.

I should have just, I wanted to, throw them all in the bin there and then, but I didn’t, I lived with them, secretly hating their existence. I’ve always been more tight arse than stylish when it really came down to it.

Then David moved in with his motley selection of cups. Puppies and kittens and rainbows and Indian gods, and various other clichés in which David likes to indulge himself, all of which David left behind when he moved out, some of which I still have to this day. Grimace.

And Shane seemed to accumulate coffee mugs from his work, which although more often than not white, came with slogans on the side of them in big, bold letters.

When Shane moved overseas he left his (corporate) coffee cups behind.

After that, Sam and I lived here on our own for 6 years, so we didn’t use so many coffee cups and the deplorables seemed to loiter in the back of the cupboard. I have made various attempts to fix the coffee cup dilemma. (Slow, no I wouldn’t say I was slow)

It took a while to find coffee mugs that I liked. They have to be of a certain size. They need to be on the large side, rather than on the small size. They need to be a decent size for a decent cup of coffee, or tea. And they need to be an appealing shape. So when I found some that I like in Ikea, I bought 10 mugs. Jill had them in blue, and so when I saw them in white and on sale I snapped them up. Now these mugs were taller and slimmer than I really liked but I figured they would be okay. However, they over balanced easily, from the first day that I had them, several times just a brush of the hand knocked them over. And when we were recovering from, shall we say, a big weekend and I accidently bumped one with a water glass, stupidly reaching over my laptop and the bottom of the glass just brushed the top of the cup and it tipped a full cup of tea into my laptop, the Ikeas collection when back to the Ikea shop too.

Mugs I liked turned out to be difficult to find. Some people said I was fussy. Jill said she had no trouble with her blue Ikea mugs. But, I held out hope that one day I too would join those happy couples satisfied with their mug choice.

Sam bought a set of, what I would call, 1970’s mugs, half green, half beige, with a kind of Rothko pattern on the side. I bristled at their arrival and Sam couldn’t understand my objection, in fact, he looked at me like I was losing my mind.

Oh, a life time of wants.

Then, somewhat by accident, well, when I least expected it, I found mugs that I liked in Woolies, of all places, in a pack of four for relatively little money.

And very pleased I have been with them too. They are of a pleasing shape and a pleasing size. And they are just a touch retro, well, in my mind they are.

The cup cupboard was getting quite empty so the twelve mugs that I purchased just seemed to replenish the cup cupboard once again. They didn’t seem to exorcise the non-white cups altogether. The deplorables seemed to hang around not quite being fully banished. Not least of all because we seemed to break the new white ones, I guess, because they are the ones we used, well, I use. Funny about that.

I bought some that, I thought, were matching in K-mart and while they were slightly different when I got them home, the handles were a different shape and they were a little more square than the Woollies cups, they were alike enough that only I would, probably, notice the difference.

Recently, when I have had more time to consider such things as kitchen cups, I decided to replace all of my non-white mugs, just get it over and done with, so when I was in Woollies just recently, I headed to the cup isle.

Woollies didn’t have the four pack at the reduced price, they only had four packs of mugs that looked like they belonged on a float in Rio. I tut tutted as I rummaged through the shelves thoroughly to make sure I wasn’t missing any.

They did have the white mugs on the single mug hooks at the more expensive price, so I bought 2 new mugs, just to go some way towards replacing the ones we have broken recently, thinking I could wait until they get the four pack in again. Or, I could try my luck at K-Mart they, essentially, have the same mugs. I can laugh to myself at the difference, when I have company, indulging my true Virgo nature, as we sip our long blacks with a dash of milk, or afternoon tea with banana cake.

However, wouldn’t you know it, when I got the two replacements home, the new mugs were, obviously, cream and not white. Fucken hell, I thought. Curses. Defeat from the jaws of victory, yet again.