Yet another china mug bit the dust last week. This was caused by a badly placed tea caddy falling off the shelf, while DH was getting the correct caddy down, and crashing into the mugs that were waiting to be filled with tea.
It was one of our Juliet mugs. I bought some when they were new, and I bought them when they came up on Ebay. At one point, I had so many that I had "spares" hidden in a second cupboard. When I went to the spares cupboard, there were none. They don't come up very often now - not in the shape I want, anyway.
They make me smile because DH and I both, independently, started a habit when the first Romeo and Juliet mugs joined our collection. Whoever made the tea gives themselves one of the other china mugs (I also have lots of cat designs and hen designs, but I find Dunoon make lots that I really don't like) but we always use a mug with a heart on for our other half. It took a while before we realised that we both did the same thing.
It's an unspoken "I love you", every single time.
We've been doing it for so many years, and I'm struggling to work out when it started. I think we bought the first ones from the Dunoon factory shop in Stone, when we stopped there on the canal. That means it was after 1992, as we weren't on a hire boat.
The tea ones are very faded now through daily dishwashering.
Yesterday, I made the tea.... and there was no suitable mug in the cupboard; the (few) we have left were all in the dishwasher, and were mid cycle.
We do have the design in coffee cups (espresso, double espresso, and cappuccino), and in the end I improvised by using one of the enormous breakfast (cappuccino) cups for DH's tea. He commented on the enormous cup, and chuckled when I explained why.
Dunoon does still do something very recognisably R&J on their smaller mugs. But the smaller mugs are too small for tea, or we don't find them particularly comfortable to hold. After doing lots of careful comparisons, eventutally I chose something that is a variation on R&J, in a reasonably sized mug.
We'll see how they go. I can always put them at the back of the cupboard, for emergency use, until we get used to the idea.
