Like most good (somewhat) English mothers, I have taught my children how to make an excellent cup of tea, and when they do, they often ask, would you like it in a dainty mug, mum? This is one of my dainty mugs, which were once my mother’s.

In my own childhood they sat at the back of the cupboard behind the actual mugs that were used daily, and when I was helping her to pack up the house and cull all the unwanted, unused things, they had a patina of ancient dust and kitchen grease on them for lack of use. I love beautiful things, and forgotten things, and the ones that no one wants, so I asked if I could have them.

This could be a letter about using the things that are ‘for best’ every day, and not waiting for the perfect occasion — it is one of my fundamental beliefs that the right moment never comes, and there is only ever the one we are standing in. I don’t think it is that letter.

Some weeks ago one of them developed a fine hairline crack; a friend noticed it when I made him tea, that the cup was oozing hot liquid as though weeping. I hung on to it anyway.

This could be a letter about knowing when things are past use, and when to keep, and when to discard. I don’t think it is that letter, either.

When my youngest made me tea the other day, the shock of the hot water against the cold porcelain was too much for it and it shattered along the crack, just as I knew it someday would. Porcelain is pretty funny at the molecular level, as is materials science generally. Readers who are interested in how, and why may enjoy this book on the subject.

It would be needlessly dramatic and over-writerly to insist that as the crack widened to a break, I felt it in my heart, though I did, a bit. I am permitting myself the sentiment because I have few if any things from the elders of my family, certainly nothing which could be described as an heirloom — a natural consequence of lives lived constantly packing, culling, discarding, fleeing. This broken cup will now be among the lost things.

Today as I drank my morning coffee from one of its sister cups I realised that it’s just a thing, just one more thing in a world of them, and that the junk shop a few streets over has any number of them in its window. There is still yet time for me to choose the one that my granddaughter, or her mother will drink from someday years from now, perhaps thinking as I do today, what a fine thing, what a beautiful thing she kept for me to have.