General News
3 June, 2025
More than just a mug
MAN IN THE CORNER: It’s not every day that a morning coffee with a workmate delivers a moment that stops you in your tracks, but that’s exactly what happened to a local lad not long ago.
He was sitting with a colleague, having a quiet cuppa, when something caught his eye.
It wasn’t the coffee, it was the mug.
A photo mug, to be precise. He blinked once, then again.
There, printed among a group of smiling faces on the side of the cup, was his late grandmother with her four sisters - the last photo of all five of them together, taken before her twin sister passed away from cancer just a few months later, in 1979.
It was one of those surreal moments that makes time feel like it folds in on itself, recognition flashing across the decades.
As it turns out, the mug had been saved from the tip some years earlier by his colleague’s wife, from a house in Murtoa.
She had been helping a friend move her mother into assisted living and spotted the mug in a box of things bound for the bin.
Thinking it looked sentimental and too lovely to throw away, she held onto it and later gave it to her husband to use at work, where it earned the nickname “The Nanna Mug.”
And so, it sat, quietly holding morning brews, its story unknown.
After a few messages between family members, it was confirmed.
This was one of only five mugs ever made by his grandmother in 2005, one for each of the sisters.
His family had thought it was lost years ago.
That mug doesn’t live at the office anymore.
It’s now at home with the local lad, safely tucked in the cupboard, brought out only on weekends or special occasions.
It’s no longer just a coffee cup. It’s a quiet keepsake, a bridge to family, and a reminder of how extraordinary the ordinary can be.
Because sometimes, in the most unexpected corners of country life, our stories find their way home.