You're Beautiful

Simon Jenkins, chairman of the National Trust as well as a former editor of "The Times", wrote about beauty in this week's Sunday version of the paper - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5907426.ece. Beauty as in scenic beauty, that is. Not a Renault style of beauty but that of the natural world. Beauty is something to be avoided; at least, the use of the word is avoided. That's his argument. You wouldn't know it: the adjective from the noun is not avoided hereabouts. It is positively over-used; in brochures especially. While Jenkins claims, rightly to a great extent, that the word beauty "borders on the politically incorrect", there is not the same sense of embarrassment among those who stuff local promotional material with the exaggeration of beauty and beautiful as there may indeed be among those responsible for the "catalogues of beauty" that Jenkins has "combed". Here a landscape, there a restaurant terrace: all is beauty and beautiful.

Though the word may have been proscribed in the UK, it is in the top ten of the thesaurus for the Mallorcan propagandist. So much is beautiful, that it can't all be. There again - in the eye of the beholder and all that. According to polls, states Simon Jenkins, 45% say that "natural surroundings" constitute beauty; 33% views. But there are natural surroundings and there are natural surroundings; there are views and there are views. The nature park of Albufera is natural - the map in "The Bulletin" even said so the other day ("the natural park"). Beautiful? I wouldn't have said so, and I live opposite. The point with Albufera is that it is flat and that there are whole loads of rushes; you can't actually see a great deal in order to determine whether it's beautiful or not. And if you look in the wrong direction, there's a dirty great power station coming into view. Some find beauty in industrial scenes, but industry is not what most would have in mind for Mallorca. The view across the bay of Alcúdia. Beautiful? In the distance, there's the other power station - the old one - that suggests otherwise, and then there is the occasional hulk anchored near to the port.

There's drama and then there is beauty, and I wonder if we don't confuse the two. Up in the mountains of the Tramuntana would be drama, but are the "natural surroundings" and the "views" beautiful? Ruggedness does not beget beauty. Or does it? Do beauty and beautiful always have to be refined, honed, shaped, richly-coloured? Can they be angular, chipped, grey? Jenkins observes that the National Trust opts for "chocolate box" shots for its photographs, and the reason it does is that they are "beautiful". The chocolate box top is saturated in the four-colour system, displays hues of vibrancy and regularity of scene: somewhere like Stourhead in autumn would qualify for the National Trust definition.

In official circles, beauty may be frowned upon, but it is still something that is easy to slip in. "Beautiful" is a default setting for those who peddle brochure talk. I'm wondering if it is possible, just conceivable that a brochure or a website could be written or constructed without beautiful or beauty, or also without pretty, awesome, lovely, wonderful, awe-inspiring, dramatic, perfect, splendid, extraordinary, exquisite ... .


Will the R-word cause the bottom to fall out of the Elvis market? It was once calculated that, at the then rate of growth, by 2019 one third of the world's population would be Elvis impersonators. What this, whatever it was, didn't establish was where most of them would be. I can. Most of them are in Mallorca. Just as well that the Elvii aren't in Las Vegas because it is there that the Elvis market is going arse-up.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - JoJo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FY8hl6b54A). Today's title - oh dear, how could I have done this?

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