Thread 5: 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 item in the Observer
https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-the-truth-behind-the-blockbuster-book-video

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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

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Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement Raynor Winn

Well everyone trying to fake a death vanishes to somewhere. Ask John Darwin’s wife…

Have reported another post naming the children.

Yeah please don't name the children. If they have grown up with parents like that they've endured enough

I loved the book and the film. I don’t know if the allegations are true or not (have they been proven beyond doubt?) but the story itself still means something to me and still resonates with me.

I’m also uneasy about the vitriol being directed at Raynor. I didn’t find her snobbish or condescending just honest and flawed.

@Animaladinai think you should ask for that post to be deleted. The kids didn’t choose their parents and it’s not fair on them. I am sure they are having a tough week. (Although they must have willingly signed up as shareholders of that company)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000ml9b

I don't think the children's identities are fair game and have reported too.

And now the Salt Path controversy makes it to tonight's 'Dead Ringers' on Radio 4….

I might have to eat my words it's breaking out..... https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002flmd and the next shoe to fall will be if it gets on Any Questions at 8.30 !

There is such a thing as, "So bad it's good."

Some of happiest times of my life was comparing book notes with a friend who was in the military doing odd things in foreign places and we would talk about reading, "Skiddy Sneldon."

Sidney Sheldon.

"Where are you up to?"

"I've got to the bit when the internationally acclaimed classical pianist gets his fingers crushed by a sinister Russian agent in Vienna."

"Oh well, I won't spoil the bit about when it was the wrong identical twin on the jetski."

At 07:00 if you want to skip - that said I haven't listened to Dead Ringers for years it's certainly not ageing well and John Culshaw has sadly left.

I agree that it is the right call not to name the Walker/Winn's adult children on here, so let's not do that again please to the pps concerned. They are using different names to ones in public records - and for whatever reason.

One thing to note however is that they are not children or young adults. I seem to remember a pp posting that they are in their 30s now? Both have been mentioned in the books, on RW's website and on SM, including the daughter packing books to send out (the Saltlines £30 journal, IIRC) and the son with regard to the family's involvement in the London Marathon. They are certainly old enough now to be aware of the full picture.

Isn’t that Only Fools & Horses ? Del Boy & Mafia? :)

I'm getting some gay vibes from Moth in that picture apropos of nothing !

Surely “Drawn to the light(bulb)”

I haven’t read the book but in a way I felt the observer’s focus on the illness kind of let the investigation down. Everything else was well evidenced but the stuff about his disease was just a bunch of doctors who had never met him speculating about his diagnosis, which is pretty unprofessional of them.

Now she’s released the letters and it does seem like he at least had a working diagnosis of what she said he had. So can someone who has read the book explain what the issue is here? Presumably she made out it was terminal? Though indolent I guess it could have been, though? The suggestion in the Observer article was that she had fabricated the illness and that doesn’t seem to be the case at all.

It kind of feels like the journalist got a bit carried away when she discovered the other lies when in a way it would have been a stronger investigation had she left the speculation about his medical condition out of it.

This is just so utterly brazen! I guess she'd been doing it so long she thought she could do anything and they'd never notice!

Things hit a low point over Easter in 2008, when there was not enough money in the accounts to pay the staff’s wages. Luckily, a customer then paid £600 in cash for a survey.

“Instead of putting it in the safe, he asked Sally to pay it into the bank so on Friday he could do the wages,” Hemmings said.

When Friday arrived, Martin went to the bank to check the balance and there was not enough. The £600 was nowhere to be seen.

The London lawyers were lucky Martin Hemmings agreed to the money being paid back and to not press charges:

Martin asked the bank manager to go through his accounts and found that more than £6,000 over several months had been written off in cheques with a signature aping his own.

The evidence is pretty clear that she is a thief and they did a flit when the bailiffs were circling. She doesn’t deny any of that.

@Wiltingasparagusfern the issue with the illness is that she said they go the terminal diagnosis just before leaving - the letters show a first diagnosis of potentially a mild version 2 years after the walk.

she has messed with the timeline considerably and added things to try and emphasise a victim narrative

I don’t feel sorry for her at all as all these people coming forward and the evidence points to a person who thinks they deserve things in life that they haven’t worked for and that if people call them out they are big meanies

eta you haven’t read the book but in it they talk about stealing from others and a feeling of entitlement

What on earth was she spending the money on?

Two garage owners told The Times that the Walkers left town still owing them money for work. One of them, Gwyn Griffith, said that on more than one occasion Sally used cheques that bounced to pay for fuel. “I went up to the cottage twice [to ask for money],” he said, but it was empty.

Difficult to explain away forging cheques.

I think you havent understood the letters properly.

If in the case of the latter then I wonder if they'll do a statement/interview. Now that one paper has named them I suspect the others will follow and I'd be waiting to proclaim "not in my name" loud and clear.

Anyone wanting a walking book I’m enjoying Where skylarks sing by Patrick Davies an ex diplomat. He’s honest about his trials writes beautifully about the places he passes through and is unfailingly polite about the many kind and welcoming people he encounters. I saw Sally perform at. Gigspanner gig and found her unbelievably irritating only then did I read up on the SP. Also the benefit they were claiming was likely to be tax credits paid for people on low income byHMRC there was no signing on and UC wasn’t really a thing in 2013.

I think it’s the doughty underdog/triumph of the spirit thing.

Lovely mildly hippy couple, in love since their teens, restore a ruined farmhouse and its land with their own hands and raise two children there and it’s their only income source, only to lose it after years of dogged legal fighting, because of their own trusting nature, the friend who betrayed them, Big Business and a legal loophole (not understood by little people representing themselves against Big Business and the other dude’s clever lawyer, whose hand Moth still shakes after they’ve lost everything), and, as if it isn’t enough that they’re about to be homeless, the husband gets a terminal diagnosis two days later.

And they have nowhere to go, no one willing to take them in, and are literally hiding under the stairs with the bailiffs pounding on the door when they decide, in desperation to do something magníficently brave and odd, rather than knuckling down, doing the banal thing, and getting jobs and living in council emergency accommodation, because he’s going to die within a couple of years and she can’t bear not to be with him every second they have left. And he can’t even put his own rucksack on at the start, and they have only £48 a week to feed themselves, and sometimes that doesn’t come through, and he runs out of his drug, and the path is brutally hard, and they’re starving and watching other people heartlessly chomp through cream teas and be horrible when they say they’re homeless, and once or twice they steal because they’re desperate, but they share what little they have with anyone else poor etc etc. But gradually, nature is sustaining, and the sick man gets much better…

It’s got everything.

Love Dead Ringers. I'll have a listen later

I've got half an eye out for some sort of exclusive double page splash in one of the weekend papers.