Who bought all the Sports Direct mugs in the kitchen?

The only certainty left in 21st century Britain is that there is a Sports Direct mug in your kitchen cupboard, right now.

I’m serious. I’m not playing games with you. The only thing that unifies our stratified society is that Sports Direct mug in your kitchen. For everyone has one, and I mean everyone. I knew a guy who had four. He used them to store his pens. Sam had a lot of pens. 

Some disturbing questions regarding that Sports Direct mug, the one in everyone’s kitchen: who bought it? Where did it come from? How did it get there? Why is it there?

It’s certainly not for drinking. No way. Have you ever even tried to drink something out of a Sports Direct mug? Silly question: of course you have, you know the weird, uncomfortable feeling of drinking from a mug vastly bigger than your mouth. The wasteful process of pouring out an entire teapot, an entire cafetiere to fill one mug, and then finding yourself unable to drink it. That single, now infamous day you spilled its contents everywhere, and made the living room look like a Thai beach on Boxing Day 2004.

The truth is that there is no why with Sports Direct mugs. No one knows how they got there. Whoever bought it can’t remember buying it, and certainly won’t admit to it now. The Sports Direct mug is a brute fact of your kitchen now, as irrevocable as gravity, about as useful a laptop made out of wax, a grotesque, gigantic metaphor for how evil Mike Ashley is. 

Sports Direct mugs are easily the weirdest thing everyone in this country owns. Fair enough that a lot of people have cars, or smartphones, or deodorant. Those are useful, purposeful things. The Sports Direct mug looks like it was designed for a different species – one with cave-sized mouths and plate-sized hands.

Maybe they’re the ones who bought all the mugs. Or, most likely, it was the guy who bought a pair of trainers and had a mug sent along with them for free. Who can realluy say what’s more likely?