Thread 2. To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[AWanderingFool]

Thread Two for The Salt Path and Raynor Winn/Sally Walker/Sally Winn discussions.

Thread One is here: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5368194-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

The Observer article says Sally borrowed £100k.

The whodunnit reveal comment from me earlier was just meant as a light-hearted silly joke. I thought it was funny, but I do have a lame sense of humour! It all came about because I was curious about why he was called Moth, but it felt like a letdown that it was just a shortening of Timothy!

THe loan was 100k and with accrued interest was 150k by the time the court case happened

I think there is a 6 year statute of limitation on some types of debts but I can’t imagine that would apply when the debtor has done a runner.

The figures seem to vary.
It did quote (Observer) that she stole close to £65K but with interest on the loan it reached £150K.

Are we confusing borrowed with the amount she stole from her employer?

I can assure you that first language Welsh speakers are perfectly able and regularly do read media articles and novels in English. Me being one of them, having read this book not long after it originally came out.

It had a very striking cover, which I think helped sell it. (And which lots of other publishers have copied since then) I heard it recommended on Saturday Review (BBC Radio 4) by a serious reviewer who had totally fallen for it. He'd been about to board a train for a long journey and had nothing to read and he chose the book on its cover alone.

A few months later it was nominated for my book group, and because a serious Radio 4 reviewer had been raving about it I read it (I sometimes ducked out of the group if I didn't want to waste my time on rubbishy books). Much of TSP rang false to me: Moth's illness, losing the house, the decision to go on the run in Cornwall, the relationship with their kids. It turned out that everyone else in the book group was smitten and I was left gobsmacked. There was quite a pile-on and a couple of people treated me very differently afterwards. I gained a reputation for being a nasty old cynic who'd see the worst in any lovely thing. So I'm very much enjoying being proved right, even though I'm no longer in touch with most of the other book groupers.

He's probably been very sensibly keeping his mouth well and truly shut.

It says she borrowed £100k from James and that James could put an interest rate of 18% against their home.

She borrowed 100k to cover the theft and the legal fees for both parties re the nda

“We kept looking back [through the accounts],” Hemmings remembers. “In the end, I think it was around £64,000 she’d nicked over the previous few years.”

She STOLE £64K according to the Observer .

If she 'borrowed' £100K that was surely to repay the money she stole plus whatever other debts she'd accrued.

At the risk of sounding like Mrs Dashwood in Sense & Sensibility, there is something in Sally Walker’s eyes I don’t like. She looks shifty.

It's interesting to me how hardline the distant relative became once there was an opportunity. He supposedly started off being all "nobody in my family's going to go to prison" and ended up bending over backwards to ensure that the loan couldn't be passed off as a business loss and even going so far as to write a statement urging the factors to repossess and sell the house. If it could have been characterised as a business loss, it wouldn't have been any skin off his nose as far as I can see. It makes me wonder if he was actually glad to see them suffer - except in that case, why help in the first place? In view of everything coming out, I half wonder if they extorted him originally - help us out, you're good for it, do you want your name associated with us in the press forever more, etc.

Part of me is really wanting to read the follow-up stories to see if stuff like that comes out, part of me is a bit worried this is all playing out too much like a Greek tragedy and something awful is going to happen. I don't know if I could cope with the intensity of the media gaze in her shoes to be completely honest.

Yes, I’m just saying she borrowed £100k, not £64k. @Bruisername has explained further. Your post said the loan was £65k.

@CatNoBag of course. I’m sorry to have suggested people who speak Welsh as a first language can’t and don’t read English books and articles. What I was trying to say is that it’s still likely the people that the Winns/Walkers owed money to in Wales wouldn’t have read the book, or heard of it, because it was written in English. I think that’s a fair point to make.

It’s only interesting because the straightforward explanation has been deliberately obscured, presumably to hide the real name.

The relative went bust and the loan was an asset that he had to sell I would imagine

Well I am not nasty, but I admit to being an old cynic, which is probably why I hate this type of book so much! I am also not a book club type - tried it once and I have no capacity for reading books that other people think are going to be great reads.

I did once get about 2/3rds of the way through a "story of my life and how hard it was" book (and I rarely give up on a book even if it is awful) which, within seconds of starting it, I realised was written by someone who went to my old school, was the same age as my brother, and lived about a mile from where I grew up. Never read more whining excuses for a life than that, and my review of it on Goodreads was more accurate and erudite than the book!

And they were trying to get out of it by arguing it was a business loan not a personal loan.

By the time he'd provided the signed witness statement which explicitly said he'd loaned the money because of her embezzlement, he was probably well and truly pissed off with them to say the least.

I haven't read whole threads, but just to add that I am SO gutted about this, absolutely loved the book (and sequels) and saw the film. In hindsight of course it doesn't make sense that you would lend a friend money and they would somehow get a charge over your property...!

If somebody posted on here that they had been asked to lend £65k to the spouse of a distant relative in these circumstances, I think the response would be that the relative should LTB!

What book was that, @PhilippaGeorgiou? You don’t have to say, of course, but I’m intrigued!

In fairness, it’s not remotely new aged or hocus-pocus. grubby realist in style if anything. Lots of wild pooing, blisters, and Ray continually horrified by her increasingly haggard, sunburnt appearance.

RW’s depiction of hocus-pocus Glastonbury, where they stop for a rest while driving to leave their van with a friend before starting the walk, is extremely hostile, if anything, featuring a vitriolic account of a well-spoken, suspiciously clean beggar they think is faking for money, and an event that involves some kind of guided meditation with angels which involves lying on the floor and which apparently makes Moth’s condition so much worse they have to spend a fortnight at their friend’s house, rather than a night.

After which RW says something very tart about ‘outstaying their welcome’, which struck me as a mean thing to say about someone who’d taken you in for two weeks and let you leave your van on her drive.

It’s definitely not a gently hippy

The revelations make a lot more sense of some off the oddities of the book, like her anger and bitterness about many people who ‘help’ them, and the fact that she chooses to describe shoplifting food when they’re hungry which I think is a veiled reference to her theft of the £64 k — ‘We needed it more than they did!) and that scene where someone’s dog jumps up on her in a village, she drops their remaining coins and is trying to find them in the gutter while the dog’s owner thinks she’s a drunk tramp, and some child picks up a pound to buy icecream.

There’s a genuine sense of grievance against the world, which doesn’t understand their plight. It’s possible her logic when stealing from her employer was similar, especially if it was to get them out of some financial pickle.

Fascinating stuff.

Woman who writes book where she admits she steals and rips people off turns out to be thief and liar.

Whoever would have thought it?

And yet thousands of people have read about the original thefts without having a problem with them. I wonder where their line is for acceptable/unacceptable thieving and dishonesty.

Of course it makes sense, otherwise you run the risk of losing the £100,000 you've lent.

And if you've lent someone money because they need it to pay back someone they've stolen money from then putting a charge on their house is the only sensible thing to do.