Ian McMillan: Are we all mugs, or simply sitting targets?

I think I sighed with pleasure as I sank into the voluminous cushions, and then I seem to recall an atmosphere of awkwardness, and my sigh

hung there naked in the sudden, tight silence in the room.

All the teachers were staring at me like characters in a cartoon. A

couple of mouths hung open, one with a biscuit halfway to it,

suspended and frozen in time. A clock ticked hugely. A newspaper

flapped unread and a text message was half-sent. I realised I'd done something wrong, and glanced instinctively at my flies, to make

sure my zip wasn't open. No, nothing wrong there: zipped up like a good 'un.

Then the staff room door opened, creaking like a coffin lid in a

vampire film, and a stately teacher hove into view like a battleship.

She moved, as though on rails, to the chair. To her chair. To her chair that I was sitting in. I scrambled out of it like a man leaping from a wasps' nest, just in time, as she sat down, smiled, pulled out a KitKat and offered me a stick.

I thought I'd got away with it until I noticed she had started to stare at my cup of tea. I was drinking from her "World's Best Grandma" mug. Oh dear. The chair and the mug: a double whammy, in legal terms, like

burgling somebody then driving the stolen goods away in their own car, the one you've nicked from their garage.

Afterwards, I found out that she'd taught at the school since before

the days of colour TV and she'd always sat in that chair and I was

the first person (through ignorance rather than malice or mischief, admittedly) who'd ever tried to sit in it while supping tea from her mug.

I felt a little righteously angry: "Surely we're all grown-ups here?" I asked. "Does it really matter which chair you sit in and which mug you glug from?" Then I remembered how I'd jumped from the seat as she approached, because I knew that somehow, in some obscure way, I was doing the wrong thing. And that was before the Mug Identification Moment.

I was thinking about this the other day and I started to tell my wife about it and then I stopped because I realised I was lolling on the settee, the one on the left hand side of the room as you walk

in; the settee I always sit on. I had a cup of tea in my favourite big fat spotty mug.

She was sitting at the other side of the room, knitting, at the side

of the room where she always sits, her cuppa in the blue mug she likes. I thought about the place I'm sitting to write this, at the table in the back room where I've sat down to work for many years, with my

spotty mug by my side.

When my grandson Thomas was a baby, he'd be carried into the room and he'd glance at the table, at the place where he knew I'd be. When I was little, I remember that my dad liked to sit in a certain chair in the back room, the one near the canary's cage, and my mam would sit in another chair, reading by the window because the light was better.

I looked around the room: there were loads of places to sit. I could sit beside my wife, although there was a possibility of knitting needle injury. I could sit on the floor. I could lie on the floor. I could sit on the piano stool. I could, if I moved a few photos, sit on the piano. I could drink from the Newcastle University Mug or the Flowery Mug or the Radio 2 Mug. Of course, I didn't move, because I felt comfortable at my end of my settee, near my reading lamp, just by the bookcase, and, of course, I kept drinking from the mug that I call My Mug; it would have been silly to move and it would have felt, well, wrong.

Is this a universal thing, then, this Chair Territory, this Mug Assumption? Does the Queen have a favourite chair, a favourite end of the drawing room? Does she have a mug with "World's Best Queen" on it, and does she glare at Prince Philip when he picks it up in error? Did cavepeople sit a certain end of the cave and did Adam and Eve have their favourite tufts of grass in Eden and their favourite coconut shells to sip from?

Time for a cup of tea, I reckon, while I think about this deeply philosophical and cultural conundrum. Now, where's that spotty mug?