Thread 4: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

The Observer The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...

Second article in the Observer
https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-whats-in-the-book-and-what-the-observer-has-found

Third article in the Observer
https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-the-truth-behind-the-blockbuster-book-video

Thread One ^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?^

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

Thread 3 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5369425-thread-3-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement Raynor Winn

I'm in.

Personally i am looking forward to The Observer this Sunday. I bet they are just sitting on their hands thinking 'keep digging'.

Quoting @savory from the previous thread:

But still, loads of people connected with their story. It clearly moved people and gave them hope, and I don't think that should be thrown out entirely.

They connected with it because they thought it was true.

The loan from the company is so ridiculous I’m surprised anyone would let it pass a proofread

as for the CBD - it does look like she embellished which is sad because they did mislead people that he got better from CBD by long walks. That’s on her

as for him - he is clearly unwell and I hope he’s ok

From the Observer:

In total, Sally and Tim Walker borrowed £100,000 from Rebecca's husband James. Documents filed at the Land Registry show the loan from Tim Walker's relative was secured against the Walkers' house with a substantial annual interest rate of 18% "payable on demand". These were tough terms from a relative, but the Walkers were desperate

From Raynor Winn:

In 2008, we asked for the money back. He said he didn’t have it but offered us a loan through his company. We agreed. Because the loan was coming from his company, he said it had to follow the company’s standard loan terms: 18% interest, which he would cover, and a charge on our home in his name

So Cooper definitely wasn't Moth's distant relative and yet the interest rate in each version is suspiciously 18%. I guess the Land Registry may reveal the truth...

I bet you wished you never started this. A kind of idle observation about a book you'd read a few years ago turning up the paper as not what it seemed and now it's a full time job curating the thread.

Anyway. Let's go gossip a gogo.

Taken at face value, her statement knocks down quite a few of the foxes currently running unless or until new evidence proves otherwise. I seem to recall the Nicola Bulley threads went on for 10,000 posts, and let’s be honest, it wasn’t Mumsnet’s finest hour. She's a flawed human being in a messy world, like the rest of us. Just yesterday, plenty of posters were convinced that Moth’s illness whatever it was had been completely faked. That particular line of doubt now seems pretty well closed down.

Not at all. He seems to have some kind of condition, not diagnosed as CBD, very slow progressing, first noted two years after they did the walk.

Thread 3 is filling up with dubious posts. Not at all daunted. Thanks @DisappointedReader for the be thread.

So, if Moth didn't have any diagnosis when they set off on the walk, it was basically to escape the money situation back home?

She hasn't remotely rebutted the accusations of theft.

Noone innocent remortgages their house on dodgy terms to pay back £64k in exchange for an NDA.

Do you think she believes she is telling the truth? I wonder if that’s why some people think she’s genuine, because she believes she’s telling a true story. She’s not holding her hands up so this will probably keep running.

It doesn't knock down anything.

She clearly embezzled money.

Tim isn't terminally ill with CBD, in fact doesn't seem to have CBD at all.

Even if the French property is now worthless, remortgaging a property to buy a second property abroad implies quite a lot of financial security - and then they also claim to have had tens of thousands to invest in another company.

I suppose you could argue that they genuinely have a pattern of throwing away money.

But ‘feckless couple lose house’ is not the book that was sold by Penguin.

Re his illness.

My take on this, firstly as a doctor; secondly as someone who has in the past received a potentially life-limiting serious diagnosis.

He clearly has "something", and the neurologists aren't sure what, but believe that it is something akin to one of the "parkinson's plus" diseases; he is however "fortunate" (inasmuch as receiving such a diagnosis can be) to have a mild and indolent case.

When people get serious diagnoses they often do go into a spiral. Things get misremembered and embellished; or they get ignored and downplayed. Note his consultant warning him off googling (end of first letter!)

Clearly TW has been relatively lucky in the course of his illness so far, and there's no reason for anyone to wish him any further illhealth.

But from a personal viewpoint, I can tell you the date I was admitted to hospital for urgent surgery, the date of my formal diagnosis. I know exactly which holiday I went on the previous summer, and which I did the following summer when I was still desperately trying to process things for myself. There's no chance whatsoever that I would misremember such a key fact. I'll bet everyone else here who has been in similar circumstances can say the same.

As someone else has said, jiggling the facts around so that the story is that he received a firm terminal diagnosis before they set off, propels this part of the story into fictional territory. I guess they still did the walk; it can't have been physically easy for either of them if he had as-yet-undiagnosed symptoms. But he had NOT received a terminal diagnosis, they weren't carrying the fear of early death with them, and whilst they may have been worrying about his symptoms, that's not the same at all.

(And before anyone says anything, I too was "fortunate" and, years later, (nearly) everything is fine!)

Nicola Bulley did not write multiple books about her life and sell the rights to a film company.

This. She referred to her embezzlement of her employer’s funds as ‘any mistakes I made’. How do you mistakenly not deposit the cash takings in the company bank account and keep it for yourself as she did?

Well it was a mistake to steal from her employer.
Reading between the lines that’s what she means.

Exactly. And I guess the reason they had to get dodgy loan from Cousin McDodgy to pay back the thieving was because they had already remortgaged their house to buy this valueless french wasteland

And actually, I would have liked the book more if it had just started with "we made a fuckton of terrible decisions and lost our house". (Or words to that effect ). By the time I had got through the word soup or implausible reasons it was everyone else's fault they were homeless I already disliked them

I like a devil's advocate/contrarian, but I definitely get the sense that there are a few posters who are paid by a reputation management company. Her statement does not come anywhere close to refuting the allegations made against her.

Happy to get paid and will write any old tosh for peanuts where do I sign up ?

Hemmings says that one day in 2008 Martin looked at the company bank balance and realised that Walker had failed to deposit a large sum of cash.

I don’t know how this can have an innocent explanation.

Obviously software can malfunction (see post office scandal) but in a small business there should be evidence of transactions beyond the software.

I felt sad and disappointed that the book may be a fake of sorts in part.
I am a bit stunned by the threads in mumsnet though. It does have the flavour of a witch hunt.
Without minimising any of the untruths / misrepresentation i do wonder why the strength of reaction.
Raynor Winn / Sally Walker is hardly Trump or even Boris Johnson is she ? I daresay many or most of our politicians are thief's and liers. She is not a murderer or a rapist.

Thieves sorry 😞

Just to repost what I put on Thread 3 (I've namechanged today btw, didn't like being a wandering fool!!)

"In the darkness, I began to believe the doctors and accept that I had been in denial, to realize that their words could be true. No matter how much I fought it, he would die..."
The Salt Path, p. 209

Writing about 2014, early summer I think, whilst they're at Polly's house.

This is such utter utter hogwash. Whatever you were thinking in the dark, Sally, it wasn't about a disease that didn't crop up for your husband in the real world until 2015.

If they had just said ‘based on real events’ rather than the unflinching truth she wouldn’t be in this mess

I don’t think anyone would be so bothered - in fact it should have gone in travel. The only reason I can see it having to miss travel is if the walk was untruthful and people could pick holes in it

she doesn’t come across as very nice in the book so not sure why she did try and sanitise the house loss story. She could have just said that due to naïveté and bad financial decisions they lost it. Maybe have glossed over the theft but it wouldn’t have been such a gotcha when it came out

i just told my DH her story of the loan gone wrong and he burst out laughing!