Vessels
Vessels
On Cups – Penny Craswell
1
There is something comfortingly intimate about a cup. There is perhaps no other object to which we touch our lips more often. Fierce, irrational attachments form to favourite cups or mugs. If they break or go missing, we mourn their loss. They are vessels that we carry with us through life – or rather, that carry us through the long days and dark nights of our lives.
Kiln-fired pottery cups may shatter, but they do not degrade. Fragments of cups thousands of years old persist in the earth’s layers, tiny reminders that people, whose languages and ways of life are now unimaginable to us, once upon a time sat down to drink from cups.
When archaeologists dredged the riverbeds at the bottom of Amsterdam’s canals between 2003 and 2012, they uncovered 700,000 objects. Everything you can think of is there, including a large number of ceramic fragments.
They stitched together a vast image of their findings and published it online. You can zoom in or out of it at will. It is mesmerising. As you scan the brightly patterned ceramic shards, it is not always possible to tell a cup from a mug, a teapot from a jug. There are bits of plates, bowls, chamber-pots.
There’s a shard from a beaker dated from 2400–2000 BCE. Brown and earthy, it is decorated with subtle cross-hatching. This cup was made by one of the early Bronze Age ‘beaker people’ who originated from this part of the Netherlands, so named because they were buried with their bell-shaped beakers.
There’s a delicate porcelain teacup from the mid-nineteenth century, with a small handle and enamel glaze. Letters have been painted in gold across the outside of the cup, only half-visible now: –venter.
Beside it is a sturdy white mug that looks almost completely undamaged by its time in the canal. Estimated to be from between 1925 and 1975, it, too, is made of porcelain, though it looks nothing like the translucent, gold-painted teacup.
Why were these cups thrown into the canals? Were they already broken? Or did people grow tired of them and throw them in whole? Were they tossed in after arguments or did they fall in by mistake?
Objects come and go from our lives. Some utilitarian objects can gather meaning as they persist, becoming more than the sum of their parts. Then again, what to one person is a treasured keepsake or an object of beauty might be somebody else’s canal trash.
2
Sophie Moran, who is a production potter, thinks about a cup in terms of size, weight, shape, the look and feel of its surface, and how it sits in her hands when she holds it. Is the handle too thin – and at risk of breaking – or too thick? Can she fit her fingers in behind it? If yes, then how many: two or three?
Sophie makes functional tableware on the wheel. After deciding on a design, she works in collections, making the same piece again and again. Over the years, she became so skilled that her finished works started to look too perfect, like they were machine-manufactured.
‘When I repeat something too often, I get good at it and then it doesn’t look natural,’ she says. ‘I like it when it looks a little hesitant or tentative. Then they’re a little different and have their own characteristics.’
Changing the clay she uses has helped her to resolve this issue. She gave up on porcelain’s smooth perfect surfaces and now sticks to coarser stoneware, where each object shows the hand of the maker.
Cups are always popular, she tells me, because they’re at an accessible price point. You can buy one, or two, or six. You can have a lot of mismatching cups in the cupboard and nobody will bat an eyelid, whereas with tableware, people tend to think in matching sets.
In her studio in Melbourne, she holds up two of her favourite cups of her own making. One has a white glaze, with a darker clay beneath. The other is dark brown, nearly black. They’re both generously sized, with rounded forms and slim handles that can accommodate two fingers comfortably. The round shape formed by throwing the cup on the wheel has been altered by shallow carvings around the outside of the cups. They are sturdy, everyday designs, and unmistakeably handmade.
These are gorgeous pieces, but to Sophie they are also working prototypes – a visual reminder of the initial design of each range, so she can keep emulating the same piece. ‘Each iteration of the cups is ever so slightly different because they are thrown on different days. The act of throwing is intensely of the moment. I might throw twenty to thirty of one form, and they capture the mood of the day.’
Sophie’s work is heavily influenced by Japanese pottery, which she studied during her two-year diploma of ceramics. Years after first making contact with Japanese potter Akio Nukaga via Instagram, she visited him at his studio in Kasama, a city about an hour’s drive from Tokyo.
She describes Nukaga’s pottery as having a quiet, earthy beauty to it, with uniform shapes and straightforward forms – especially his cups – while his vases are often bulbous. His works are known for distinctive vertical lines called shinogi lines, a decorative technique where parallel grooves are carved into the surface. In the world of contemporary ceramics, he is one of Japan’s most famous potters, and his pieces sell out quickly.
Sophie shows me a Nukaga cup that she bought before her trip to meet him. Afterwards, she realised it was probably made by an assistant in his busy studio. It is stoneware, made from red clay with a white glaze, in a simple cylindrical shape. It doesn’t just sit on a shelf – it’s her most used cup, from which she drinks her coffee, and sometimes green tea.
The Japanese philosopher Sōetsu Yanagi wrote in 1933 that mingei – or folk craft objects – must be made for daily use, and they must be ordinary things. They may be cheap, but they should also be sturdy. This perfectly describes Nukaga’s cups.
A few years ago, Sophie spoke at an Australian Ceramics Association event, The Good Cup, as part of Sydney Craft Week. Potters crammed into a studio where Sophie shared stories about some of her favourite cups at the time (her favourites tend to change fairly often, as is probably true for many of us).
She interrupts her story to ask me what my own favourite cup is – at least for the moment. I mention a cup by London designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby for Royal Doulton, part of a forty-piece set called Olio. It is not a ceramicist’s cup, but more of a design object, made in a factory in Staffordshire, and its plain form and neutral colours reflect that. Every time I use it, I am reminded of the designers themselves, whose British charm and infectious enthusiasm I have experienced in person when interviewing them for magazines.
Each potter who came along to Sophie’s event also brought in a cup to swap, she tells me. They spent a few happy hours together talking about handles, proportions, clay bodies, heat properties, glazes: all the secrets to making a good cup. Cups were exchanged, perhaps new favourites were made.
For potters, cups are true companions. ‘There’s nothing better than having a cupboard full of friends,’ Sophie says. ‘Stories stick to cups, more than they stick to other objects. A bowl or a plate stays on the table, but you hold a cup.’
3
Two and a half thousand years ago, when the Greek philosopher Diogenes decided to live out his extreme vision of a simple life – and give away all of his possessions – the last item he discarded was his cup.
This was in ancient Athens, a city obsessed with wealth and power.
Diogenes believed that everybody should reject society’s pressure to accumulate things, as only then would ‘your soul be in a calm and cheerful state’.
He made his home in a large jar called a pithos, set up in the public marketplace, even though passers-by called him a dog. He begged in the streets, asking not for charity, but for ‘what he was owed’. When asked what wine he liked to drink, he said, ‘Everybody else’s.’
He was also a kind of ancient performance artist. One of his stunts was to carry a lantern through the streets in the middle of the day, saying he was ‘looking for an honest man’ but couldn’t find one.
His fame grew. Later, he was granted an audience with Alexander the Great, who, standing over him, said, ‘Ask whatever you wish of me.’
Diogenes replied (sunning himself), ‘Stand out of my light.’
We have no idea what Diogenes actually looked like, though paintings and etchings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show various artists’ imaginings of him – in his jar, or with his lantern. Nor do we know what the cup he discarded looked like. But we do know why he threw it away. He saw a boy drinking water from his hands and realised – so the story goes – that since nature had provided him with hands, he no longer needed a cup.
This story takes on a new significance in a twenty-first century world drowning in objects, where discarded cups, along with all other kinds of detritus, overflow in landfill and fill the oceans.
Where will all this striving for new stuff get us?
4
It’s Sunday afternoon. I’m at a repair café in Sydney’s northern suburbs, where repairers are working with the owners of broken things in small groups at tables dotted around a community hall.
I’m sitting with Glenda Hoy, who has long hair reaching almost to her waist. She comes here on the first Sunday of each month to repair broken ceramics. Opposite her is the owner of two broken blue ceramic objects. He is tall and energetic, but seems a little shy. Also with us is a young trainee, hair tied back, polite, inquisitive, here to learn the ropes.
We gaze at the man’s dark blue objects, almost black in the centre. They might be cups or bowls, but I don’t think they are functional. I don’t really like them – to me, they look like dinosaur eggs cracked open by hatchlings. But I remind myself that taste is subjective.
Glenda is in full swing, talking as she works, showing us her materials – liquid nails, then wood filler – describing how it should feel, what to look for.
The trainee asks, ‘Do you use your finger to apply wood filler to the cracks?’
‘Yes, because that’s quite dry and crumbly. I can remove the excess better,’ Glenda says. ‘See this jagged edge?’ she asks, pulling out a long file. ‘I’m just going to take that sharp edge off.’
She is all process and technique. As she continues to file, using the weight of her body to steady herself, I ask the owner, ‘Is there a story behind these?’
‘No. Well, there’s not a great story. Normally I have some colourful story. I went to this shop, I saw them and I bought them right away.’
I’ll admit I’m disappointed. We turn our attention back to the blue objects and to the repair.
Glenda gives us a little history: the repair café movement started in Holland in about 2009, and spread around the world from there. But as a ceramicist, she first started repairing her own broken cups forty years ago. Then, about two decades ago, she started working as an art conservator.
For her, volunteering like this is a way of giving back to her local community. This is important for Glenda, because she herself was supported by her community when she was a single mother with young children. All the repairers and helpers here are volunteers.
The owner of the blue objects tells us he has tried to get them repaired before, but couldn’t find anyone willing to take them on. He had a go at fixing them himself, inadvertently making Glenda’s job more difficult by using a glue that is water-repellent and hard to remove.
Glenda won’t repair cups that are intended for use (not just decoration) because boiling water poured for tea or coffee can dissolve the glue. The cup can break again, spilling its hot contents and causing burns. She also stresses the dangers of making ceramics – how certain glazes are not food-safe, how a broken edge of glaze can cut the hand like glass. She talks about kiln workers in the Chinese porcelain capital of Jingdezhen who die young of respiratory diseases due to long-term exposure to silica dust. It is a city where people do not have the privilege of growing old.
Pulling out a tube of blue paint and one of black, Glenda says that mixing the right colour is the hardest part of a repair. She gently dabs her blue-tipped paintbrush across the surface of the objects as we chat, peering through her magnifying glasses. She is nearly done.
Now the owner of the blue objects raises his voice above the grinding sound of someone’s scissors being sharpened at a table nearby.
‘Actually, there is a story,’ he says. ‘I was with some friends. They have a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old who were scootering. I challenged them to a race and hit a section of the pavement. I went straight down. I was on the ground, and I pushed in here . . .’ He touched his elbow. ‘And there was nothing there. The bone was gone.’ He stands and shows us the scar. ‘It was the day before I was moving house. I was in hospital getting surgery when the removalists came. I returned to my new home to discover [these cups] had been broken.’
Glenda reminds him, as he gently wraps his blue objects in an old towel, preparing to leave, that they are not water-safe: he must never drink from them. They will have to remain on his shelf, silent sentinels to be admired from afar.
5
I wake, check my phone. A shower, then breakfast. My bowl is blue-and-white striped. My cup has a painting by Central Desert artist Lily Sandover Kngwarreye on it, feathery black strokes on white.
I stack cups on trays, turn on the dishwasher.
Select my shoes – black sneakers made of ocean plastic – and straighten my hair at the ends where it tickles me (I need a haircut). I grab my green umbrella on the way out the door.
Today, I’m off to the museum to seek out archaeological cups.
I walk through Erskineville, wondering which buildings used to be warehouses. I know this place was once a hub of manufacturing. My husband’s aunt worked down one of these streets in the 1950s, in the laboratory at Bradford Mill, making bedding.
It’s a hot, rainy day. I run for the bus.
At the Chau Chak Wing Museum, I’m self-conscious because my wet shoes are squeaking. The guard’s shoes squeak too.
I do a quick circuit of the ground floor and upstairs, where there are scientific instruments and bark paintings. No cups.
Two levels down and it is all ancient Greek amphora, jugs, busts and tablets. Wait, here’s a cup – with a long handle? I google kyathos. It’s not a cup, but a cup-shaped ladle.
Now we’re in south Italy, in the first millennium. Here are two rhytons. Another quick phone check and I see that, yes, these are cups for drinking, despite not having a flat base on which to rest.
One of the cups’ bases is shaped like a ram’s head, the other like a griffin. They are grotesque and fascinating. What sort of person would have drunk from these? And were they for everyday use or only for ceremonies or display?
Downstairs again, and we’re in the Middle East: Teleilat Ghassul in Jordan, between the years 4500 and 3900 BCE.
Among the artefacts is a collection of ‘ceramic cultic objects’. The label says that ‘cultic’ means it has been excavated from a building ‘identified as a cultic sanctuary or shrine’. These were excavated by teams from here at the University of Sydney, between 1975 and 1977.
There’s a cup here. It’s called a cornet cup: starting cylindrical and coming to a point at the base (cornet means cone-shaped). It is an earth-red colour and smooth, but by no means perfect. It’s almost possible to imagine the hands that shaped this 6000 years ago. Faint lines, where the red fades, become brown, hint at a possible decorative element. It is quite small.
As I look, I am conscious that a man close by is also examining these cabinets.
‘Wow,’ he exclaims, before he seems to realise that I am here.
After that, we do not make eye contact, but both stay quiet, stopping to look, read, then move on, stepping out the familiar museum choreography.
I like this museum. It’s a mixed bag, but there’s always something new to discover. In the café, over tea – plain white cup and saucer – and a sandwich, I look up Teleilat Ghassul and discover that the University of Sydney excavations there in the 1970s were led by an archaeologist named John Basil Hennessy.
The article says that Basil, as he was called, was ‘well-known for his openness, warm nature and good humour’. He started his education late, after serving in World War II from the age of seventeen. His passion for archaeological digs was fuelled by his participation in a dig at Jericho in the 1950s, led by Dame Kathleen Kenyon.
This dig in the hot, dry desert proved that Jericho’s Stone Age foundation was the oldest known continuously occupied human settlement. It made Dame Kenyon one of the most famous archaeologists of all time.
Dame Kenyon herself was ‘larger than life’, according to one article. She grew up in a house next to the British Museum, which must have sparked her fascination for the past. She became the first female president of the Oxford Archaeological Society in an era when there weren’t many women at university at all. She never married, and became one of the best-known British archaeologists of the twentieth century.
The rain is bucketing down when I leave the museum. I take shelter in the university library, a brutalist building. After a quick catalogue search, I’m on the eighth floor reading a well-worn book about Basil’s excavations at Teleilat Ghassul, two decades after the Jericho dig. This is where the cornet cup I saw in the museum was dug up, about 20 kilometres from Jericho.
The book is almost impossible for a layperson to read – full of archaeological details, charts, numbers, jargon – and yet the warmth the authors felt for Basil is clear in the book’s dedication, published after his death: ‘For JBH’.
A photograph shows Basil with beard, glasses and polo shirt, crouching in the dig, walls of earth rising up on all sides. This is where Basil and his colleagues dug up this cornet cup, a small artefact that – along with many other ceramic shards – helped to prove the longevity of human settlement in this part of the world. Their hands were the first to touch this cup for 6000 years.
I sit by a long vertical window, alone on the eighth floor of the library, looking out onto a slice of rain-streaked roofs. Which of the cups that we hold and treasure today will end up being discovered in another 6000 years? Will anyone still be around to dig them up?
6
Kirsten Wehner grew up within the Mount Stromlo Observatory complex, on the top of a mountain near Canberra. Astronomical telescopes were housed in distinctive metal dome-shaped buildings around the bushland site, pointed at distant parts of the universe.
In the 1970s, when Kirsten lived there, families in which at least one parent was working at the observatory were given housing on-site. The astronomers and astrophysicists (mostly men at the time) would stay up all night making observations, and sleep during the day. They needed a quiet house. Their children would be sent out to roam the mountain.
Kirsten’s father was not one of the men up all night. He was an engineer who worked during the day designing the telescopic instruments. When he arrived from Germany, he assembled his first telescope from pieces strewn across the floor.
In those days, teatime was sacred – everyone would drop what they were doing at the allocated hour and head straight to the tearoom. From when Kirsten was quite small, she was free to leave the house alone. She would walk through the pine forest to her father’s office and tap on the window, and they would head to the tearoom together.
Milka, the tea lady, seemed to tower above little Kirsten. But Milka would always make a fuss of her, bringing Kirsten weak milky tea and biscuits, the two amusing each other as the only two females in a room full of male scientists discussing distant galaxies.
Now a curator at the National Museum of Australia, Kirsten embarked on a project in 2016 to record stories related to environmental crises. She discovered an object that deeply resonated with her own life experiences: a teacup from Mount Stromlo, fused in the extreme heat of the 2003 bushfires to a piece of aluminium from the observatory’s telescopes.
That firestorm razed Mount Stromlo Observatory. Everyone was evacuated in time and there was no loss of life, but the fire destroyed every telescope but one, melting their domes and shattering their glass lenses. When it was over, all the observatory buildings were gone, with only a shell of the administration building left. Books on shelves in the library had been reduced to columns of ash.
Many of the staff homes were also destroyed, but not Kirsten’s childhood home. By then, Kirsten’s father had retired and her parents had moved to ‘town’, to the western edge of Canberra. But they were not safe there either – their house was in the path of the fire.
In 2003, as the bushfire raged, Kirsten listened to the unfolding news from New York, while trying – and failing – to make contact with her parents. Eventually, she managed to reach her brother. Their parents were defending their house, he told her, but he’d had to leave them to protect his own home, also under threat.
When Kirsten returned home, she was struck most by what had happened to her parents’ swimming pool. Within the blackened landscape of their garden, the pool’s fibreglass surrounds had twisted and melted in the intense heat, but the water had protected the bottom and sides of the pool underneath: a blue opal of resistance.
The house, all its windows blasted in, had been saved by her parents using garden hoses. They had watched the houses on either side of them burn to the ground. One house had seemed to be all right, they told her, but then the bush next to the gas pipe had caught fire, and there’d been a big explosion.
Her mother already had some experience fighting fires at Mount Stromlo in 1952. That time, they had been able to beat back the flames and save the telescopes – though there was a lot less to destroy at the time. Back then, Kirsten’s mother was working at Mount Stromlo as a researcher and was the only woman living in the ‘bachelors’ quarters’. Her father had been appointed but was still on his way from Germany – the pair met when he arrived later in 1952, and they married three years later.
When the catastrophic 2019–20 bushfires were burning across Australia’s east, Kirsten’s father, then in his mid-nineties, told her they reminded him of his experiences at the end of World War II. As a German soldier released from a prisoner of war camp in Scotland, he had slowly made the journey home across a devastated, blackened Europe, with smoke choking the air.
For Kirsten, the Mount Stromlo cup – ceramic fused with molten metal – is an extraordinary object that evokes her childhood, where teatime meant safety and comfort, and the observatory’s precious telescopes, tended to by her father, had not yet been melted by a firestorm. The violence of this fusing is why the observatory’s telescopes are all now decommissioned; the site’s value is historical more than astronomical these days.
How did that standard-issue office teacup get joined in this way to the aluminium from the telescopes? It must have been forgotten by a scientist working in one of the domed telescope buildings on the mountain’s summit. Perhaps they took a cup of hot tea into the dome while they were working, to stay awake. The telescope searched for nebula – enormous clouds of gas and dust in outer space, the birthplace of stars – as the firestorm slowly gathered strength.
The astronomer sipped their tea, checked the clock, sighed. The long night hours stretched ahead.
7
An ordinary kitchen bench in an ordinary kitchen. A collection of washed dishes and pots are piled high on a red drying rack, plate upon upturned cup, more plates still, an upside-down bowl in blue and white, a utensil jutting out at an odd angle, a saucepan resting precariously on top. Beside them, on a stainless-steel drainer: a crumpled tea towel and a teacup and saucer filled with hot tea.
The painting, called Washing Up, is a wood block print by Australian artist Cressida Campbell. It captures something so banal, so workaday and unremarkable, that it instantly arrests me. It’s a weekday afternoon. I’d like to linger, but I’m in a rush to catch the train back home to Sydney from Canberra.
The day before, staying with my parents in the apartment they recently downsized into, I mention I’m writing something about cups.
With that, all the cups start coming out.
Mum shows me two wide, shallow cups from Myanmar, made of a lightweight and flexible bamboo decorated in red on black lacquer. She bought them when she and Dad lived in Bangkok in the 1990s, from Elephant House, a shop owned by Myanmar-born Cherie, an acquaintance made through one of Dad’s soil research colleagues.
Next, we peer through the glass doors of Mum’s cabinet of best china – there are so many objects in there, each with its own story, that I can never keep track. But Mum knows the stories by heart – milestones, memories, treasures.
She points to a large teacup and saucer in exquisite porcelain, ornate gold and dark blue on white. This is one of those pieces that has been in Mum’s family for generations. We don’t know how old it is, except that it was old even when my grandmother was young. Mum turns over the cup, but there are no markings underneath to give us a clue.
A fine bone china tea set is carefully stacked on the shelf above: six cups, six saucers, six side plates, a jug and a large serving plate and bowl. These are also heirlooms, Mum says, probably from the same branch of the family, the Cormacks. They are less ornate but just as splendid, also in blue, gold and white. When Mum was a child in Brisbane in the 1950s, this was her mother’s best tea set. When her mother wheeled it out on her wooden tray mobile, Mum knew someone important was coming to visit, worthy of having their tea in ‘the good things’, plus a slice of my Gran’s famous sponge cake with caramel icing.
Standing in the kitchen looking in the cupboards, where the everyday cups are, Mum hands me a robust mug in light blue and white, with her name (Alison) written on it. This was given to her by her aunt Gwen, whom her mother and everyone in the family said she was just like.
‘Why?’ I ask.
There was a resemblance, Mum says, but it was more than that. Their natures were similar. Gwen was never in a hurry, and she was creative, too.
On a higher shelf, I spot a mug I gave Dad when I was a kid. It says I love Dad in bright primary colours, with a picture of a house and the sun. Of course he kept it.
Last, Mum digs out a little enamel mug, beaten up, tiny, the size of a Japanese sake cup. This cup, she says, once hung on a hook above the stairs at my grandmother’s childhood house in North Sydney, a lovely home with sprawling gardens. The day that my grandmother was tall enough to reach up and unhook the cup marked an important milestone when she was a little girl.
This is just like her, my gran. What was just an ordinary cup for water in the garden, she saw as a personal challenge. Her life was to change considerably in the coming decades, orphaned as the eldest of five children, surviving the Depression and the war, but never losing her sense of humour. Life was a challenge to be overcome. Even in her eighties, she was strong – I can still remember her iron grip when she held my hand.
8
Mr and Mrs WS Garrad
Kendall Dale
Milton NSW
25 January 1946
To my dear Mother and Father,
I hope this letter finds you well. Our trip home went well, with only three stops for supplies and petrol. The car fared well on the dirt road that had been so treacherous on the way over. Now the water from last month’s rain is nearly gone it was much better. John says they will start building the extension to the Princes Highway soon now that the war is over and that will make things much easier to get home. He reckons the car trip from Milton to Coniston could take as little as three hours once they finish.
We took your advice and stopped in at Faust’s Newsagency and Gift Store in Milton on the way and they had several lovely tea sets. I bought the matching sugar bowl and jug, which are white with a beautiful colour illustration of the main street in Milton, with the words ‘The Princes Highway, Milton, N.S.W.’ written underneath. In the shop, Hans said they are fine bone china, made by Royal Stafford China in England. The illustration is based on a photograph apparently.
I have unpacked them and put them in the china cabinet to remind me of you and home. It goes very well with the tea set I bought in Albury, and the other Royal Albert cups.
I do hope you can visit us some time during the year.
Otherwise, we will visit again soon.
Your loving daughter,
Grace
Note: This fictional letter is based on information published on the Storyplace website about a real sugar bowl and jug in the collection of the Milton Ulladulla Historical Society.
9
As vessels made from clay, ceramic cups have an elemental quality to them. They connect us to the earth, grounding us. The empty space they hold can be interpreted symbolically; perhaps for this reason, they’re used in rituals across the world.
On a cold night in Launceston, I was invited to take part in a ritual tens of thousands of years old.
A fire was put out, leaving red-hot coals. Eucalyptus branches were laid on top, producing clouds of smoke that stung our eyes. Mostly women, we huddled close against the wind and strained to hear, to learn.
Aunty Patsy Cameron AO held a cup in both her hands. The cup was simple, the colour of the earth. Inside was ochre mixed with water, a muddy soup warmer than the air.
She welcomed each of us in turn, painting a moon and two stars on the hand of every woman who came forward, using her fingers dipped in ochre. Her touch was gentle.
When we had all been painted, we talked, meeting new people, cradling our hands, still wet with the ochre. In that moment, I felt the strength of community and the power of ritual, like I had been let in on a secret, touched by Country.
10
Ladies
Make the tea, pour the tea, drink the tea.
Wash the cup, dry the cup, put the cup away.
Make the tea, pour the tea, drink the tea.
Wash the cup, dry the cup, put the cup away.
Only four poems by Chinese poet Bao Junhui still exist. In one, she tastes tea at dawn.
After leaving the women’s quarters of the palace, passing windows and blinds,
to the East Pavilion, where tea awaits.
Views of mountains, bamboo, hibiscus.
As music plays in gentle chords from below.
Ten centuries later, in Europe, and porcelain fever grips the upper classes.
Sailing ships laden with blue and white crockery; white gold.
Jane Austen writes to her sister Cassandra about the pleasure of receiving, unpacking and approving her new Wedgwood.
A handle is invented to stop ladies from burning their fingers.
Queensland. 1920s.
How to read tea leaves.
Are you looking closely?
What shapes can you see?
Do the leaves look shapeless?
Keep looking.
Maybe you are not a natural.
Make sure you use quality Bushells tea.
Meanwhile, in Paris,
after she wears a particularly fetching fur bracelet to lunch,
Picasso suggests that sculptor Méret Oppenheim cover everything in fur.
‘Even this cup and saucer?’ she laughs.
She is twenty-two and already the toast of town.
1982. Commonwealth Games. My gran has been to the souvenir shop.
The blue and red logo and mascot – Matilda the Kangaroo – on everything.
She decides to wear all of her purchases at once.
A hat with mini-umbrella fitted.
A scarf covered in red and blue logos.
Other souvenirs she hangs off her ears or holds – like the mug with Matilda on it – as she struts through the living room.
Do we still have that mug?
I hope so.
Caught the flu? Tea.
Failed your exam? Tea.
Death in the family? Tea.
Calamities calmed with milk and one sugar.
It’s 2023 and Emily (@snackqueen666) is not crazy.
Her boyfriend’s favourite mug, with his first initial on it, was not given to him by his ex.
When the pair moved in together, the Daily Mail explains, Emily had to ‘deal with seeing the mug all around their home’.
But Emily finds out the truth at Christmas, when his stepdad gives her a mug with her first initial on it.
‘That is so cute and I suddenly love this mug,’ says Emily.
Crisis averted.
Boil the kettle, pour the tea, drink the tea,
Wash the mug, dry the mug, put the mug away.
‘On Cups’ was originally published in Stories That Want to be Told: The Long Lede Anthology, Vintage Books, 2024.
Penny Craswell is a writer based in Sydney with a specialisation in design and architecture. She is the author of The New Sustainable House (2024), Reclaimed: New homes from old materials (2022) and Design Lives Here (2020). A former magazine editor, she has a Masters of Design (UNSW, 2017) and writes regularly for publications including Green magazine and Houses magazine. Her work has also recently been published in The Design Book: Big Ideas Explained Simply (2024) and stories that want to be told: The Long Lede Anthology (2024).
