With Autumn approaching and air getting chillier little by little, I am able again to come back to my torrential tea habits. Yes, and this means I will be soon in trouble. Because my beautiful Japanese teacup got smashed accidentally in July. It was an unpleasant accident, involving a bear, hard candy and the printer. The teacup was innocent and got mixed in this whole gory affair in spite of itself. That’s because I’m keeping all my things in a very limited space, so I deserved it. I haven’t learned a lesson from it, that’s for sure. And I don’t have decent teacup anymore. I’m browsing ebay to find a replacement; since I want my cup to come directly from Japan it’ll take some time. What will I do in the meantime? I have other cups of course. But I don’t like them. My cup was tiny and had beautiful carvings in it. Those I own are stupid cups painted with ugly flowers or fruit. I don’t remember buying them, I don’t remember anybody in the family ever buying them. Who wants something so characterless? They probably came with something else. I don’t know how some objects come to live with you in these cases. I also have a thermal cup I got as a gift ages ago, when I was in high school. There’s a dismal frog in a field on it. It’s a thermal cup. The frog tells you by turning into a prince when the content is hot. But it’s a big cup, presumably for milk rather than for tea. There’s also that expensive tea set I got for Christmas. It’s vaguely Asian in style, but it’s probably made in Italy. That’s not the point anyway. I have nothing against it. It’s that I don’t want to use a teacup that has other three twin sisters stashed away in a dark box somewhere. I don’t want to depersonalize my very intimate tea-sipping ritual. And the teapot. I don’t need that pretentious teapot. It’s small and it looks terribly fragile despite its sturdiness. I wouldn’t know where to put it. There’s enough kitchenware around this house already. I have my own teapot, something conveniently anonymous that will hold a lot of tea and I can keep in my room without fearing to break it every five minutes. I have other six or seven teapots around the house, stuff somebody bought and never even used. Again, items with gold platings and flowers and things like that. I’m not old and brain-dead enough yet to want to use something like that or even look at it on daily basis. The truth is I wish I didn’t kill my teacup. But I know if I’ll get another I’ll keep it in the same spot I used to keep its dead predecessor. Sad, but I have no other place in the room to keep it. It’s the only free spot there is, apart from the chair.