Seventeen years! I’ve been drinking out of that mug for seventeen years. Broken.

Devastated.

I am devastated. Am I devastated? This is probably not the word one should use about their emotional state after an event. The literal meaning seems to relate to something physical, something *real*. Saying that, it seems all one has to do in the english language now is use a word in a certain way for about seven or nine minutes and the OED says, ‘new word alert, NEW WORD ALERT!’ How twerkingly fucking moist.

Anyway.

In 1996 I was a research student sharing an office with another research student. I’d just finished an MA course on which I was 50% of the student body (On my birthday the other 50% of the course bought me a copy of Ted Simon’s Jupiter’s Travels inscribed: ‘To Billy, from all the lads on the MA in Southern African Studies course’. Finally got round to reading it last year, 7/10). My officemate, Jo, was parsecs ahead of me in terms of PhDing, but we spent a lot of time in that office talking about things that had nothing to do with our research. In short, I was a bad influence. Jo studied women and crime in Manchester while I gazed wistfully at Britain’s ill-conceived colonial development policy in southern Africa. We would often wander over to the main building for coffee breaks, lunch breaks, tea breaks, break breaks. This was not conducive to the progress of our writing.

Perhaps in an effort to curtail at least some of these journeys away from our desks, Jo purchased two mugs and reasserted the need for local hot drink production. The mugs were pink. I think perhaps neither of them was ever really intended for my use. I used them. I carried on using them. I’d take one with me to seminars I was ‘convening’ or lectures I was mumbling. I carried on using them as my officemate submitted her thesis. I carried on using them after she left for pastures new. I took them to another building on campus when I got a job there, and carried on using them. I took them to another building when I got a different job, I carried on using them there too. I was moving on up and the mugs were coming with me, sharing the adventure. But in 2000, a friend smashed one as he ‘fell up the stairs’. I was a little bit devastated when I found out, but he dropped the fact into a conversation when there were plenty of other people around. Wise man. I remember wondering if the remaing mug was sad with its twinly bond so cruely severed.

The remaining mug endured. But now it was more precious, more rare. I no longer allowed it to sit on the communal mug tray, it deserved better. If I was taking leave, it went in the drawer. In 2003 I got a job at another university and guess what? No! I took the mug home. Safe. It was now part of my home life, a promotion perhaps. It was used a lot. It became part of a new history.

So many things changed in the years I drank from that mug. It and I went through a lot. I held that mug in my hand as I laughed for joy and in the darkest hours of loss. When I had to start dialysis and record my fluid intake, it was there. 300 millilitres. Perfect. Perfect for tea, real coffee, flavoured hot water (or as some people call it, ‘herbal tea’), Lemsip, hot Vimto, Horlicks, hot choc, well, you get the idea. Oh, and vodka once. Once. Since my kidney transplant I have to try and drink 4 litres per day. 4! FOUR! Sometimes, at weekends, the majority of those 4 litres found their way to my lips in the pink mug.

The pink mug. Inanimate. Comforting. Important. Irreplaceable.

You see the mug had become more than a mug. It was previous stages in my life. Not better or worse, just previous. Although, it is in my nature to look back fondly at the past, maybe because in the ensuing years life got so ridiculously grown up. Ok, better! The mug was a time traveller. It existed in the present and in the past, its wibbly wobbly presence cut through all those timelines, all those events, all that history.

The pink mug was also clever. Genius in fact. Its very identity could change in a nanosecond. In the blink of an eye it could be practical drinking vessel then, suddenly, a point of reference in a innumerable flashbacks. But at its core it was always that old pink mug from my research student days and as I look at the cracked wreckage before me, that original identity is overwhelming.

Flashback: laughing.

Flashback: Tina at the door.

Flashback: Smilla feeling for High Fidelity.

Flashback: eating Remegel.

Flashback: laughter.

Flashback: Jo.

Where does the time go? Seventeen years, in a mug. I’m all adulty now, I even have research students of my own. I wonder if they have pink mugs.

I hope so.

I also hope they have better sense and keep in touch with good friends.