What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?
Today we heard from British novelist Patrick Gale, author of 16 novels, including Rough Music – reputedly the most widely held book in libraries. We also spoke to Sue, bookseller at Hunting Raven Bookshop in Frome and to Kate and Nic from Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath.
Patrick took time to think about the most beautiful thing he has seen whilst sitting on a train crawling through rural Ireland, and like one of the suitors in The King Who Wanted More, he has chosen a rose (although not a red one): ‘…the most beautiful thing I've ever seen is something I'm lucky enough to see for much of the year whenever I step outside my study in the garden. It's a fantastically lovely rose, Souvenir du Docteur Jamain, in that hard-to-photograph shade of deep purple that plant breeders often arrived at in their obsessive quest for black. It thrives on a largely sunless wall, has elegant, bug free foliage, smells like heaven and is a salutary reminder that nothing I write can begin to rival the beauties of nature!’
Patrick is also a talented musician. He attended the choir school for Winchester Cathedral and later sang for the London Philharmonic Choir. He also takes nice photographs - if the picture he gave us of his rose is anything to go by.
Sue, bookseller at Hunting Raven Bookshop in Frome, Somerset, said the most beautiful thing she had seen was a tiger. She is a regular visitor to Longleat Safari Park, which is ‘just down the road’, but on one occasion she experienced a very special moment:
‘It was late in the afternoon, just before the park closed, and there were no other cars about. Ours was the last car in.
‘The park had got two new tigers and as we travelled around we saw them playing. Suddenly they ran across the road in front of us and as they did one of them stopped and turned around to look at us. It was a very powerful.’
Whilst Sue didn't capture the moment with a photograph, here is William Blake's original of The Tyger, printed c. 1795, image courtesy of Wikipedia.
While assistant manager Kate from Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath gave the matter some thought (she was leaning towards an item of clothing), owner Nic didn't need to think twice about his most beautiful sight:
‘An Alaskan sunset – viewed from Anchorage. ‘Anchorage is a small city, but if you are high up, say in a hotel, you can see for hundreds of miles. In the foreground is the bay, and beyond that the mountains and beyond that the complete wilderness that is Alaska stretching out forever.’
To help promote our new title The King Who Wanted More, I’m finding out what is the most beautiful thing people have ever seen. It could be a landscape, a painting, a building, or maybe something altogether different...it’s completely up to you. Please email [email protected] if you'd like to take part.
