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What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?


In Gateshead, Carol Thorn of Bill Quay Bookshop, chose an elemental phenomena for her most beautiful sight - a complete, circular rainbow:

‘It was incredibly beautiful - like a coloured halo in the sky. Usually you only see an arc because the rest of the rainbow disappears beyond the horizon, but up in the hills where I used to live I was high enough to see the whole thing.

‘When I first saw it, I was like a child. I ran indoors and told my husband, “just come and look at this!” I hadn’t realised until then that rainbows were circles, but it explains why they never have an end. For me this realisation, far from spoiling the mystery, somehow made the whole thing even more beautiful.’

If you've always wondered how rainbows are formed, there is a simple explanation here including a description of the circumstances in which Carol's full rainbow can be observed. It also includes this simple diagram showing white light from the sun refracting as it passes into a water droplet before reflecting back against the back surface of the droplet to make it visible to the observer. Depending on the position of the observer, he or she will only see one colour emerging from any single droplet but as he or she glances up or down he or she will see bands of light emerging from millions of neighbouring droplets.

René Descartes' sketch of how primary and secondary rainbows are formed (courtesy Wikipedia)

Bella's Bubble - by Karen Hodgson and illustrated by Rebecca Griffiths

What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?

Aileen Davis of Appleby’s Bookshop in Morpeth couldn't choose between two sights which she felt were the most beautiful she'd seen: the orchids in Singapore (the walkways across the roads, she says, are ‘festooned’ with them)  and the aerial view of New Zealand as you approach Auckland Airport.

‘I was on holiday in NZ three years ago and as the plane came into land, I looked out of the window and on this clear day glimpsed the entire coastline, including the volcano at the other end of the island. I haven’t seen anything more beautiful.’

Singaporean Orchids

What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?

Jude Innes of J&G Innes bookshop in St Andrews believes that when it comes to a beautiful sight, you can’t beat ‘a good sunset’. In particular she recalls one she saw over the North West Island in Australia. ‘In 1988, while on holiday in Australia, I visited the area and saw the deserted island in the middle of an oyster sky - it was a very beautiful sight.’ If you don’t know what an oyster sky is (I didn’t), Jude explains: ‘it’s where the clouds are all broken up and the sky takes on a peachy hue’.

Whilst the sunset below doesn't show an oyster sky, it is a photograph from North West Island by Kristy Muir which she describes as the most beautiful place she has ever visited: Head north-west for beauty | Sunshine Coast Daily

North West Island Australia

What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?

We asked children's author Marion Clark what the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen: "I was lucky enough when I was very much younger to be in Banff, Canada with friends. One winter's night we all went to Lake Louise to visit the ice sculptures that had been made on top of the frozen lake. We trooped through drifts of snow, and found houses, cabins and sleighs made from ice blocks. The night sky was clear and we put on our skates and took to the frozen lake, we were skating around listening to the mighty glacier creak and groan when suddenly the night sky was lit up with the aurora borealis, it was a luminous display, alive with shimmering colours that danced across the sky. I was left with a feeling of complete and utter amazement at one of nature's most beautiful wonders, and if I shut my eyes I can see it all again."

Aurora borealis photographed by Robert Postma

The Croc on the Rock by Marion Clark and Tanya Fenton (to be published next year)

What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?

Jane Gardam, OBE author of children's and adult fiction and twice winner of the Whitbread Award, discussed her most beautiful sight with my mother-in-law over afternoon tea.
Jane grew up in Cumberland and the North Riding of Yorkshire, and she recalled one winter, when on a visit to Swale Falls in Richmond, she witnessed the waterfall turn to ice. It was a rare thing, caused by a sudden temperature change, which freezes the water mid flow. Although it was only a fleeting occurrence, the memory of it stayed with Jane and was later captured in her short story ‘Icicle Ride’, featured in her children’s collection The Hollow Land. The book, which now sadly appears to be out of print, arrived in today’s post and the passage below describes Jane’s experience: ‘And there round the corner to the left where the beck fell sheer, stood high as the sky a chandelier of icicles. Hundreds upon hundreds of them down the shale steps of a waterfall. There were long ones and short ones and middling ones and fat ones like an arm and thin ones like a thread. They hung down from up as high as you could see and down to your very wellingtons. And not only water had turned to spears of glass but every living thing about – the grasses, the rushes, the spider webs, the tall great fearless thistles. You could pull the tubes of ice off the long wands of the loose-strife. You could lift them off like hollow needles. You could look right down them like crystal test tubes. You could watch them twist like fairy ear-rings. And as the sun reached them they all turned at once to every colour ever known – rose and orange and blue and green and lilac – and Harry and Bell watched them until the sun slipped down a little and left them icicles again.’

Jane has twice won the Whitbread Award for The Hollow Land (1981) and, for her adult novel, The Queen of the Tambourines (1991). In addition, God on the Rocks was runner up for the Booker Prize and her story for young readers, Bridget and William, was ‘Commended’ for the Carnegie Medal.

To help promote our new title The King Who Wanted More, We're 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.

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!’