Yes, pressrun.net looks a little different today. I thought it was time for a new look – something a little more airy with a typeface that seems more open in a wispy shade of grey, the colour of vapour trails, evocative of fading memories. For remembrance’s sake, this is what pressrun.net looked like before.
I loved the Georgia font – still do – which is why I persisted with it so long. But then came the urge for a new look while fiddling with the blog on my phone. Yes, like anyone else, I also occasionally read on the phone.
Reading on the phone! The very idea seemed preposterous when I was growing up – when phones had dials, not push buttons, screens and keyboards. We talked, didn’t text. And words either bounced off the airwaves, onto radios or television screens, or were trapped on a page, bound in a book or a magazine or printed on the loose pages of a newspaper. There were no web pages then lurking in cyberspace to materialize on a computer screen at the click of a mouse. The whole thing still seems magical to me because I recall a time when there was no World Wide Web.
That is why I like this shade of grey – it looks ethereal and insubstantial, just like a vrirtually weightless web page, measured in kilobytes, not kilograms.
So, yes, this blog looks different now, but everything is still the same. I haven’t changed apart from getting on in years. And nothing’s gonna change my world. That’s why I chose this – one of my favourite songs, Across the Universe, where the Beatles sing, “Nothing’s gonna change my world.” I still love books, music and Singapore.
We get on in years, but our hearts don’t grow older with age. If anything, our heart expands, finding space for new loves, new attachments. I have come to love the World Wide Web, which did not exist in my school days.
People talk of a child’s sense of wonder. But as you grow older, you may be amazed, too, at all the changes you have lived through. You may embrace change – like I have, the internet – but bits of the past stick to you, like my love for the Beatles.
It’s only a week to 2013. Fifty years have passed since the Beatles released their first single, Love Me Do, with PS I Love You on the flip side, in October 1962. And yet here I am, moved by the melody and the lyrics of Across the Universe:
Words are flowing out like
Endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe.
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy
Are drifting through my opened mind
Possessing and caressing me.Jai Guru Deva. Om
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my worldImages of broken light, which
Dance before me like a million eyes,
They call me on and on across the universe.
Thoughts meander like a
Restless wind inside a letter box
They tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe.
The words and images and serene melody take me back to the 1960s and start up a jukebox of similar songs like The Windmills of Your Mind and She’s a Rainbow – sweet, haunting and magical.
Sure, I love the present – the internet, the smartphone, the digital media. But who can forget the past? Especially a past filled with a heavenly soundtrack?
