Sorry, I'll stop with the ChatGPT after this, I promise!
Adrian Mole's bitter reaction to TSP...
Sunday, 14th July
Weather: Intermittently proud, with scattered self-doubt
Read a newspaper review of The Salt Path this morning.
They described it as “an astonishing narrative of resilience and nature’s redemptive power.”
Which is irritating, as I once wrote something quite similar
in Year 11 about a sponsored walk around Leicester.
Raynor Winn is now being compared to Laurie Lee, despite the fact that she’s never even mentioned Bukowski or used semi-colons incorrectly on purpose.
Moth, her husband, is now something of a folk hero.
He walks, he suffers nobly, he carries an old sleeping mat like it’s a cross between Excalibur and a yoga prop.
Meanwhile, I am still waiting for The Independent to return my self-published novella
“My Brief Affair with a Vegetarian Librarian”.
It received one Amazon review. From my mother.
She said it was “ambitious.”
Back to Raynor:
The review praised the book’s “lyrical quality and quiet rage.”
My diary has rage — usually about bin collections or the decline of proper toast —
but no one calls it lyrical.
They just say I need “more hobbies.”
Apparently, the book is not just about walking,
but about the erasure of dignity in modern Britain,
the invisibility of homelessness,
and the healing capacity of wind-battered cliffs.
Which is strange,
as the last time I tried walking more than a mile,
I got shin splints and was overtaken by a toddler on a scooter.
Still, I respect what they did.
They turned disaster into movement.
They walked through pain and weather
and middle-class judgement in tea rooms.
They came out the other side —
windburned, yes —
but together.
I tried to convince Pandora to do something similar with me.
Suggested the Pennine Way.
She said I’d last “as long as an oatcake in a rainstorm.”