YES, THE CUP MATTERS

My friend, Margret Bell posted somewhere, "I can't explain this with science but the cup you drink your coffee out of matters." So simple and direct but so obviously true.

Margret - you nailed it. It does matter.

For as long as I can remember I have preferred my coffee in a tall rather than wide cup. It's my experience that coffee stays hotter longer in the taller, cylindrical cup. The wider cup exposes more surface area from which heat can escape. Makes sense to me and I expect Einstein as well.

My cup measures 4 and 3/16ths tall and 3 and 1/8th wide with a slight flare on the rim. The handle has a little bump in the top curve that is just right for the thumb to rest on. The sides of the cup are straight. No bulges.

I like a China cup. The one I am using now is made in England. It's bone China. I'm not clear as to where the bones come into the plan but there it is written on the bottom of the cup. Many of the cups that I use are actually made in China. I can't tell the difference. This style of cup seams to be a standard mold pattern in the China cup industry.

I'm not particularly picky about any art work on the cup but I do seem to lean toward flowers. I do not favor cute aphorisms on my cups. I do a fair amount of thinking as I sip from my cups, but I like freestyle thinking not pre-programmed one-liners by some back office poet in waiting, And just to be clear, I don't care for those thick road house mugs that seem endemic to the roadside café. Their only virtue is indestructibility.

I'm always on the lookout for another cup. Mostly, I have found them at TJ-Max. Carol Ann and I would look at each other some cold gray November morning and think, "What are we thinking? Why sit here waiting for a blizzard when we could go see if the stock has rolled over at TJ-Max.