When it all turns to custard

What do you do when it all turns to custard? Sometimes it's nice when other people realise you're sitting custard before you do. Sometimes you're just just sitting in it, you're actually sleeping in it, drowning in it. And you might have absolutely no idea.

If you're playing poker, you learn to mask your emotion. I might feel ecstatic at the Aces I've been dealt, but I wear that stern face of concentration as to not give myself away. I'll equally wear that stern face of concentration when I get a "Scotty flush" of a two and a seven - the most hopeless hand (back when I used to play poker regularly, I had a good mate Scotty who seemed to bet high regardless of his hand, so this aweful hand became known as the Scotty flush).

It reflects well the Chinese philosophy of "round on the outside, square on the inside" (something which I've considered as a tattoo - a square inside a circle). On the outside one must portray a round fluid calmness, no edges, no sharpness, able to deflect anything... but inside, one must be sharp, precice and accurate in their thinking.

But perhaps this internalisation of the acurateness and externalisation of round calmness encourages a false sense of being fine. Not false in the sence of pretending, but false in the sense that you don't even recognise when the custard hits the fan and you're drowning in custard, because you're used to being fine no matter what, so you must be fine.

Recently at work the subject of death came up; unnexpected, unanticipated, unwarranted death. And a colleague asked me if I believe in an afterlife. It was a difficult question! Not one I've thought about in a long time. Ultimately, the answer (I'm perhaps a little ashamed to say) is no. But I'm in two minds. I was raised an Irish Catholic, and was taught to believe in God, Jesus the Holy Ghost and Heaven. And my father died when I was a teenager, which makes it even harder to not believe in an afterlife. In response to that I was asked whether I've ever seen him since he died... It took me a few seconds to actually comprehend the question, but what I was being asked was whether I had seen him as a ghost or apparition... My initial thought was, are you serious? I'm not nuts? I don't see dead people...! But then perhaps with a little more thought, maybe I do.

The thing that brings me closest to my Dad is music. There are two types of music that do this most: music that he liked, and music that reminds me of him. Surprisingly the music that he liked doesn't invoke the same emotion in me as the music that reminds me of him. And the song that really hits that spot the most and can almost always bring a tear to my eye is not a song that Dad would have liked in the slightest... It's a British hip hop song by the Streets called "We Never Went to Church"... The song is about how he lost his dad, but Dad left "nothing to remind me of you". But as the song goes on, he notes how much he is like his father, and the killer line is "Yeah, you left me to remind me of you". Powerful stuff.

Oh wow, this wasn't going to be a blog about my dad, but there we go.

Where was I going again? Squares and circles? Tattoos even...? Appreciate the sauce? What? Yes, um... let's see if I can get back there again. Sometimes life falls off the rails, and you're swimming in custard but you have no idea. But if you have good people around you, they will notice, and they will point it out. Today a good group of people let me know that I was probably swimming in custard, and I just needed some time out and a few good chats. I'm not in the custard any more. So I guess that's the beneift of having good people around you. If I didn't have good people around me, I guess I might have kept sinking into the custard, and eventually been drowning in it.

I'm not sure I really hit the spot with this blog. But I'll publish it anyway.

When drowning in custard, always appreciate the sauce.