Thread 6: 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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Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement Raynor Winn

NB Please be careful when it comes to naming or implicating people who aren't in the public eye or have no connection to the story, especially where details are unclear or still emerging i.e. DON'T DO IT.

Keep on the path. No saltiness. Thank you.

New posters welcome. It would be helpful to read at least the three Observer articles before posting.

I kind of love that Penguin just lapped that stuff up and popped it on their website without a single person raising an eyebrow

When she mentions the abnormal scan and the normal scan in the book, when was the abnormal scan?
Because one of the letters she published on her website says the scans were negative.

@Aspanielstolemysanity it’s probably a case that they’ve let go of all the wily old foxes who cost too much and would have sniffed a rat and stuffed it full of Tabitha’s from good families who don’t really care about quality or integrity of content so long as there’s lots of fun launch parties and they can impress their uni friends with their cool job .

When I moved into my house, the garden was in a sorry state. It wasn't overgrown - the soil was dead. It was grey, dusty, and there were no worms to be found. It took a few years of nurturing to get it healthy and thriving. It's just a suburban garden, nothing fancy, but it took a lot of feeding, love, attention etc.

The Walkers apparently achieved just such a miracle, though on a much grander scale, in barely a year.

Never mind curing neurodegenerative disease, they could clearly save Moth AND mankind if only they would offer their services to those vast parts of the world where desertification is taking place.

In an interview with The Guardian (2022) SW says:

“We don’t really know what’s going on. The diagnosis has never changed, yet somehow he keeps going. We’ve been told countless times it’s impossible, and yet here we are."

It's interesting that with the recent attention, she's not showing any of this mystery doubt but doubling down on his 'diagnosis'.

The passage of time and absence of degenerative disease surely proves there's something amiss.

No evidence of any abnormal scans has been provided.

RW claims brain scans were abnormal prior to the various long walks after which the scans reverted to not showing anything abnormal again...

Been told countless times "it's impossible".

What is impossible? Who told them that?

--Presumably that the diagnosis is impossible considering Moth's condition (able to walk hundreds of miles in difficult terrain etc) and longevity.

Oh you silly sausage, you weren't meant to take this literally, this was just a representation of the "spiritual and emotional journey" they went on

Completely agree with this, @Crikeyalmighty

She hasn't provided any of those scan details, if they exist. Yes the ones mentioned in the NHS letters were normal.

I see your point to an extent. However, I want to give my personal take on this. I've done a lot of long distance walks and remember a heck of a lot about them. For example, even back in 2010 when I did the Cape Wrath Trail I could write, even now 15 years later, a pretty detailed account of what happened each day, where I walked and even conversations with my friend who I was with. Each day of walking and camping has a weird way of being memorable, more so than every day life. So I don't necessarily think RW can be excused for not remembering details of her walk. Definitely, she made stuff up but not, in my mind, because she misremembered stuff. Rather, I believe it was thought out and intentional.

Her query letters to agents and her agent’s pitch to editors would have made it plain Moth was alive, otherwise no editor would have bought TSP as a feelgood, inspirational story of survival against the odds, and even if an editor had contemplated buying a version in which Moth had died between the end of the walk and the acquisition of the book, they’d have struggled to get it past their sales and marketing.

I mean, it’s not that you can’t sell memoirs about grief and the natural world, obviously (H is for Hawk is an obvious one, and a success too), but I don’t think TSP would have sold if Moth had died before the book was published. It would look like a quixotic and cruel decision to force a vulnerable dying man to spend some of his last months walking for hours a day carrying a heavy load when other options were available, and readers would have been as likely to be outraged as inspired.

I see in The Wild Silence, Ray tells us via Simon “But remember the saying of the Great Buddha: opportunity knocks but karma tracks you down”.

What with that and beware the ‘tortoise’ that walks beside you in TSP…

When I was a child we lived in an old farmhouse, modernised in the 1920s. Our water supply was from an underground spring, which was then pumped up into a water tower. One day it started to taste of mushrooms and this went on for a number of weeks. Eventually my father got it tested by the water board and the results came back to say it was some of the purest they had come across, far better than their water. But it still tasted of mushrooms. So my father climbed up the tower and into the huge tank and there was a very dead starling - once removed, and I guess the tank emptied the taste disappeared and the water returned to its even purer state. None of us were ill from drinking our starling infused water.

I sent you a PM

We collected mussels from the beach at Monkstone, Saundersfoot South Wales and lived to tell the tale after a belly full of delicious Moules Mariner.

As a botanist or at least someone with a good grounding in horticulture, he can probably be accurate in distinguishing a field mushroom to a death cap mushroom…..mind you maybe they ate one too many —-magic mu—- shrooms hence the fantastical content of the book.

You absolutely mustn't drink from streams on the SWCP unless you have boiled the water or added purifying tablets. The SWCP is indeed a "wild strip" of varying width, and especially if it goes through National Trust or uncultivable land can be a haven for wildflowers, insects etc, but go a few hundred metres inland and you're often encountering some pretty intensive farming.

A couple of weeks ago on a hot day I set off from Port Isaac towards Tintagel and realised after about a mile that I'd forgot my water!! There were plenty of streams, but I thought staving off dehydration by getting e coli or cryptosporidium was a bad bargain, and aborted the walk.

I completed the walk today, and it was even hotter. I managed to cool down by immersing myself completely in.a stream pool just before it met the beach ( was wearing a swimming costume under my clothes), but it was full of scuzzy green weed, a sign of excess nutrients in the water (probably cow shit from the farms upstream. They shouldn't let the shit in the water. But they do :( )

Otherworldly piles of sticks are dotted around the orchard – a rarely seen, centuries-old technique for drying out wood he’s brought back. They’ve become such sites of ecological interest that academics from nearby universities have been studying them.

That is hilarious. If Penguin lap up that sort of bollocks then it comes as no surprise they were taken in by everything else.

Erm...Exeter University and its Penryn campus?? We do now have a university in Cornwall you know!!

And they are perfectly capable of doing a study on the wildlife benefits of dead hedges in orchards. I love those guys, they are the gift that never stops giving. From tracking tuna up the M5 to sticking numbers on bumble bees with superglue to doing seriously important research on climate change, they never cease to entertain and inform.

I was taught to assume there's a dead sheep upstream.

That's exactly what my dad used to say when we were children. 'There might be a dead sheep lying in it further up'. The Famous Five never worried about dead sheep, did they.

And yes to not drinking out of the bathroom tap because of the dead mice in the tank. When my mum started on about the dead mice, we would join in 'dead rats, dead cats....'

a rarely seen, centuries-old technique

😂😂😂😂😂

I see it in every bit of woodland I come across.

Oh god, maybe we should become a book group, stitch and bitch style.

Otherworldly piles of sticks are dotted around the orchard – a rarely seen, centuries-old technique for drying out wood he’s brought back. They’ve become such sites of ecological interest that academics from nearby universities have been studying them.

Hardly new or revolutionary. After the Great Storm of 1987, they found that fallen trees that were left to lie developed their own eco-systems with insects etc, which were beneficial to bird life. I think they concluded in the end that the rush to clear up wasn't necessarily the best thing to do.

I suppose it makes more sense that they did the walk not knowing of the 'terminal diagnosis' given that it does sound quite crazy to do that to such an ill man.

It is indeed. Unless you're trecking around the coast for hundreds of miles and seeing a marked improvement day by day....