Mugmigration

mugmigration (MUG-my-GRAY-shun), noun. The slow, one-way drift of mugs out of the kitchen and into every other room in the house, noticed only at the moment you open the cupboard, find one chipped mug shaped like a frog, and understand that the other eleven are somewhere upstairs.

The word joins mug with migration, though the comparison flatters the mugs considerably. Real migration is a round trip. Geese come back. Swallows come back. A mug that has reached a bedside table in February will still be there in April, holding four millimetres of tea the colour of a puddle and, in one recorded case, a small cress farm.

A household can be read by where its mugs have settled. There is the desk mug, which is never actually empty and never actually warm. The bedside mug, which is a geological layer. The bathroom mug, which stopped being a mug some years ago and is now firmly a toothbrush holder and would resent being asked. The garage mug, full of screws. The greenhouse mug with a paintbrush standing in it. The car door mug, which nobody will admit to and which rattles on roundabouts.

Usage: “We have run out of mugs again, said Dad, standing in front of a cupboard containing one mug shaped like a frog, while nineteen others waited patiently in five different rooms.” Related forms include mugreturn, the grim expedition undertaken on a Sunday evening with a laundry basket, and mugdenial, the firm belief that the four on your desk are all the same one.

The arithmetic is the funny part. Ask a household how many mugs it owns and it will say six. Count them and the answer is closer to twenty, because the number that lives in the cupboard is the only number anybody ever sees. The great return happens perhaps twice a year, usually the night before visitors arrive, and it always produces at least one mug nobody recognises, one that belongs to a neighbour, and one that has been missing so long it has become a family anecdote.

Underneath the joke is a small and rather stubborn truth about how objects move around a home. Carrying a full mug somewhere is purposeful and pleasant. You are taking tea to the place where you are about to do the thing you want to do. Carrying an empty one back is a chore with no reward at the end of it, and it competes for attention with everything else in the house. So the journey out happens dozens of times a week, the journey back happens on Sunday, and the mugs quietly pile up wherever people actually spend their time.

The same asymmetry explains why the scissors are never in the drawer, why pens gather by the telephone and nowhere else, and why every phone charger in the country ends up on the wrong side of the house. Things drift towards where they are used and stay there, because putting something back is a favour to a future version of yourself who does not seem terribly grateful. There is a nice side to this, though. If you ever want to know where a household really lives — not where it eats, or receives guests, but where it reads and works and sits and talks — do not look at the furniture. Follow the mugs.