Let’s do this together
There are so many mugs in our kitchen cupboard, I now have to play Tetris every time I empty the dishwasher. The numbers have crept up on me slowly, until this week.
I found myself stacking them three-high, each one teetering on the edge of the one below, threatening to unleash a pottery tsunami on my head. As you may already have guessed, the culprit is The Dark Lord, who has started bringing new ones into the house.
For someone who rarely drinks tea or hot chocolate and never coffee, her excessive collection of very unfunny novelty mugs has now entered the hoarding-my-own-wee stage.
“Why do we need 58 mugs in the cupboard? We’re not having 58 people over for coffee any time soon. Can you stop buying new ones please,” I asked her tetchily, as I started taking all the mugs off the shelf in an attempt to weed out the duds.
“The Santa one can go in a holding bay for another year for a start,” I said, dumping it in the bottom drawer of odds and sods. That’s a decluttering job for another life.
“I’m buying them for when I get my own place,” she explained, trying to wrestle them back from my clearout. I picked each one up and waved them around. “Will you really want a Spider-Man cup? Or the Keep Calm I’m A Teenager mug?” I asked doubtfully. “Because you’re clearly still labouring under the illusion that you’re going to be moving out before you’re 20.
“When we know it’s going to be more like 40.” I told her how I was listening to the radio the other morning as a statistician explained that, for the first time in the modern era, living with a parent is the most common young adult living arrangement – rather than as a couple with kids.
“And this is going to have a monumental effect on society,” I told her. “Starting with my mug cupboard.” I don’t know who looked more upset – her or me – at the thought of living in a multigenerational household like Charlie And The Chocolate Factory with his two sets of grandparents in the same bed.
I sighed and said: “Well, whatever happens with living arrangements in the future, I don’t want to be morbid, but let’s try to agree we have enough, more than enough, mugs to last us until we’re both dead, OK?”
■ Are you in a multi-generational house? How long did your adult children live with you – or are you living in the granny flat? Email me at siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.