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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Thread 5 Thread 5: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet

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.

Urgh tell me about it. I’ve met and worked with a lot of publishers and while they will rabidly promote “diversity” as long as it’s of the LGBTQ+ variety, they are in fact almost all young very posh women called Harriet, Lucy, Sophie etc, with mostly male, but similarly clueless bosses. A LOT of them have no clue about basic grammar and punctuation and I feel like a 300-year-old bore explaining why “a lot” is not all one word etc. (I’m not even fussing about split infinitives and end prepositions - I’m not actually old-fashioned.)

There are exceptions but meeting a working-class person is incredibly rare. I come from a half working-class, half middle-class background and even that makes me feel like an outsider as a lot of people in publishing have very narrow views and experiences.

A bit like academia, the patriarchy is in full force in publishing. Young women with arts and humanities degrees join straight from university and work for a few years until they get married and start having children. Then they go part-time or freelance while men rise to higher ranks and end up in charge, and on the highest salaries. Not many publishing companies try to combat this (though actually Penguin is one of the better ones) so there’s a kind of conveyor belt of younger women who are poorly paid but from a posh background going in and out and never becoming more experienced. Of course some are lovely people, and some do buck the trend but as a PP said, both spotting grammatical errors and spotting shysters are typically not among their strong points.

It’s also true that when something is successful, publishing gets its blinkers on and just looks for more of the same until it becomes a huge cliche.

The cruelty of the council woman's words: "Well, if you're not going to die soon, like in the next year, then you're not that ill, are you" seen unlikely. Anyway, you'd challenge it and get your doctors to back up your application.

This bit I can well believe. Having been up against the system with illness. It’s completely broken and inhumane, with many cruel individuals working within it. Fighting it is soul destroying. But when you’ve been there it’s easy to see straight through TSP for the shameless, manipulative grift that it is. It reeks of people with zero integrity. I was not surprised at all to find she was a thief.

Agreed. We have to not get carried away. Yes, it seems things definitely are not as bad as portrayed and we have much evidence of that, all of the inconsistencies ect. Even some photos on SalRay's IG show he's capable of doing a star jump, or climbing up onto a rock at about chest height to pose on it. BUT they have provided medical evidence of SOMETHING. Short of proving he's somehow managed to fake symptoms to con neurologists into making tentative CBS diagnosis, we have to conclude he does have an illness. Likewise, the doubts will remain unless they can prove otherwise how severe it actually is/was.

Following on from my comment about PRH letting wily old foxes go I think it’s important to stress to those that don’t work in media that the Taylor/winns would be described in house as ‘the talent’ - basically a nicer way of saying ‘they make us very good money’ - I work in music, similar situation .’talent’ sometimes comes into it, sometimes not so much so - but it’s very likely in this case that considerable advances of money would have been paid and this doesn’t have to be paid back if something doesn’t sell what you expect , the ‘talent’ just remains unrecouped in that situation - it’s like legalised gambling . therefore if you have invested considerable sums up front you need to keep that going, and the reaction in what is after all a business would be to hold your nose if you smell a rat etc - obviously music is slightly different as you aren’t dealing with true to life words on paper . I do think a lot of this could have been avoided if it had been stated ‘based on’ or semi autobiographical - but it is true as others have said that you don’t tend to question your ‘talent’ in case it scares them off into a competitors arms - just as you would rarely say to a valuable musician ‘this album is boring as hell or badly produced’ or whatever.

I can overlook Moth 's lack of facial expression, which may tie in with the putative diagnosis of CBS.

I'm struggling to overlook the shot (in the BBC video) of him "planking" on top of a trig point! That would take strength and coordination just to climb into it, then really good core strength plus strength in the hip and thigh muscles, to hold the pose. I bet many people without a neurological disease would struggle!

And in reality, it seems from the dates, the son actually drove from Newquay, picked them up, and took them all the way to Bristol. That bit of asking money in the book just seems made up to me, perhaps to convey/reenforce how they were still desperate and penniless.

I do wonder if Moth simply had severe depression at one point , clearly a lot of these health issues came on around the time they obviously had multiple issues going on with housing, money, her unlawful actions etc -a lot of huge mental strain can bring on all kinds of physical manifestations, and often this can present neurologically - simply being away from it may well have eased it , - I don’t think he has what it was presented as but I wouldn’t 100% dismiss the fact he had some mental health issues going on . I do suspect a fair old bit of self diagnose in the absence of medical evidence might have been going on here as they seem a bit ‘alternative’ - the thing to me that is really wrong though is actually stating stuff such as terminal or months to live in order to garner sympathy and empathy , which doesn’t actually appear to have any medical basis on paper .

Agree, the photos and story of the walk really don't tally with the self reported symptoms detailed in the consultants letters

It's an equal stretch to attribute his strange lack of emotion to Parkinsons or any other CBS illness.

If a consultant in 2019 can question whether he actually has CBD, so can everyone else.

You're right. Falmouth University (which was Falmouth School of Arts when I attended it back in the day). It's almost entirely art or arts- adjacent stuff though (ie games design).

It shares a campus with Exeter University in Penryn (they both have other campuses in Falmouth and Exeter respectively).

There are some great collaborative projects between the two universities- I have a friend who's an arts lecturer at the former who's teamed up with a biology researcher at the latter to get ants making art, for example!

Would those be ants from woodpiles on a certain cider-making farm?

There’s a difference between questioning it and calling someone a pathological liar as if it’s fact.

both spotting grammatical errors and spotting shysters are typically not among their strong points.

This is true, @WhatterySquash. I would also add that when processes became computerised, there was a huge loss of skill in publishing. Before that copy editors and proofreaders were properly trained (the company I worked for in the 1980s sent me on courses) and their corrections were taken in by external typesetters. Once it became possible for anyone to make the corrections electronically, some publishers really cut corners and started using untrained junior staff - there's now an idea that anyone can proofread, for example, which simply isn't true.

Yes, certainly to your point about 'the talent'.

Which is also why, when RW delivered the MS of The Wild Silence to her editor, that editor wouldn't have said 'Husband not dead yet? Strange!'.

I think that on balance, Penguin will probably still come out of this ahead.

However, I'm interested to understand the thinking process in the film industry.

It seems that much more money is at stake, and that with much greater publicity, it is far more likely that any discrepancies between story and reality will come to light.

The 'bad business decision' never made sense, so it was always likely that there was more to the story. However, it seems that film companies and publishers take steps to protect themselves from defamation/libel claims, but don't do much to guard against the protagonists of a 'true story' undermining or damaging the story that the film makers are trying to sell.

Do they take out insurance?

Is this similar to situations where actors have suddenly been involved in a scandal prior to film release?

In the film is there much said about the bad business deal?

if I were the film company I would have started the film with them hiding from the bailiffs but never actually say why they are losing it and just focus on the walk

another of their crimes is that thru are unlikely to get a distribution in the US and that will be a blow to the tourist board as I understand Cornwall comes out best from the whole thing

I don't think the consultant suggested there was nothing wrong with him.

To be fair, the 'pathological liars' came directly from their nephew, on the Walker side of the family.

No, they are largely humble ants from our allotments, although they did visit the Eden Project and hang out with the ants there, too.

But studying the ecological impact of piles of brushwood on a rewilding farm is the kind of thing someone from Exeter might do (and to play devil's advocate, we don't know how exactly Moth was arranging his piles of wood- it might have been an ancient technique he'd revived).

They're all over a farm that's being managed for nature down the road- they've released a species that's been extinct in Britain for some time and it's going really well (not wolves! 😆 But I don't know if it's been made public and written up yet, hence the vagueness).

Oh, one thing that struck me as odd when I was rereading TSP was that 'Polly' is a longtime friend of Raynor's, and they've known one another since their schooldays. We're never told where her farm is, only that it's 'in the middle of England, in a place we barely knew', 'in the foreign landscape of middle England' and 'as far away from the cast as we could be' -- which sounds awfully like Leicestershire, where Raynor certainly grew up, and where Moth was living in his teens when they first met. It's not as though they're in totally 'foreign territory'.

Funny how none of these longtime friends or benefactors have come forward to say what lovely amazing honest people Sally and Tim are

Well, we don't need much more of an increase in visitor numbers per se! But more walkers are always welcome, because their environmental footprint is much smaller. Especially long distance walkers- no car, come out of high season, you hardly see them- they just stumble into the crowded tourist honeypots, eat their weight in pasties and are off again.

Incidentally, I met a lot of Germans on the coast path yesterday. Has the Salt Path been translated into German?

That is correct and as such I would advise a little more restraint on the aspect of Tim/Moth's health. There are questions to answer, that appears to me to be completely clear, but the medical letters released do suggest he has something going on, just not as severely as claimed by the Winn-Walkers.

I thought part of the schtick was that she grew up on a farm in the Midlands? Was that not central to her relationship with nature?

MIL is German and about 20 years ago she and her husband came to see Cornwall and swcp - it is very popular with Germans and has been for a long while because of a female author who writes books based in Cornwall but whose name escapes me