It’s not much of a choice is it? Hopefully neither, in my own case, but it makes for a good title.
The reason for mentioning this is a collection of mugs in a little shop which has just opened up on Canongate (lower reaches of the Royal Mile), with a cafe and a selection of goods. This is great, given the large numbers of touristy shops on the Royal Mile and the limitations of trying to get more interesting cards or presents.
So, I check out their window displays on the way in to work. Craftily, they do update them, and have a collection of mugs with these kind of titles on. I’m quite tempted to get ‘darling mummy sausage’ for myself (I’m sure it’ll come in useful some day), but the selection is at least a little more interesting than wee angel/wee devil on the T-shirts in a shop further down the road…
It brought me to thinking who buys them, and for whom. There are some mug messages where you kind of hope for the individual that they chose it themselves, and are being ironic. (Dan had a tutor whose mug message was ‘old fart’.)  But clearly people must buy them for others – and should you be given ‘yummy mummy’, for example, hopefully you could feel slightly smug using this.
There’s also the category where celebrities wear t-shirts with other celebrities names on.  I thought this was quite fun when Nigella started wearing tight t-shirts that said ‘Delia’ on them, given how much celebrity cooks/chefs seem reduced to first name only.
A colleague at work has one of those ‘lines’ mugs ie with the sentence repeated. Hers is ‘I must not kiss the boys’, which I understand was a wedding present. At a time when our former director was enforcing a branded mugs only policy (ie with an office logo), she stuck to her guns and kept using her mug. In this case, we had to applaud her intention to have a distinct identity, rather than a general one that was selected for her.
It’s tricky, this ‘identity on a mug/t-shirt’ thing. Have been experiencing forms of it on Facebook, where you can compare and rate friends. A school friend asked me to compare her to others, but the application then brought up a series of questions, where you had to rate other random combinations of friends as to which was likely to be more successful, sexy etc.
I felt I just couldn’t make any such comparisons, and skipped every one of the ones it brought up, but it still suggested that I had rated 10 sets of friends. So I removed it pronto, and settled down to loading up favourite books on the Facebook application instead.
I then sent my friend a message, suggesting that she had certain skills in making microwaved custard. You can’t get a mug for this yet, nor a t-shirt, but it’s surely just a matter of time.