Thread 7: 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

Fourth item in The Observer
‘I felt I was being gaslit’ – the landlord who helped Ray...

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Thread 6
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5372494-thread-6-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

New posters welcome. It would be helpful to read at least the four Observer items above before posting.

To all - Please be careful when it comes to naming or implicating people and addresses not in the public eye or with no connection to the story, and around the understandable health speculations, especially where details are unclear or still emerging. Please do not engage with possible visitors who seem to have their own agenda and seek to derail.
Keep on the path as we have done together amazingly well for six threads so far. No saltiness. Thank you.

Well, that or fake his own death and go into hiding (not in the Lot-et-Garonne), leaving Sally to say ‘I told you he was ill!’, compel general apologies all round and publish a book about walking and grief, just as a posse of Mners get out their shovels in a graveyard or discover an urn full of sand.

Or catch a glimpse, on holiday in an obscure corner of the Carpathians, of a man with curiously familiar vertical hair reading Beowulf outside an inn…

I really feel for Gigspanner. It's a massive undertaking to get a tour organised. The finances of it are so precarious and there's hardly ever a profit. But they obviously felt an artistic response to the book and to RaySal and Moth in a way. It must all be so hard to swallow.

This may well have appeared several threads ago, since it was first published last Friday, but I've been away so only now seen it and thought it was funny enough to share (again? sorry if so but I'm sure there will be others who didn't see it too!)

Marina Hyde, pretending to write as Gregg Wallace (but clearly references the Walkerwinns! I've removed the internal link as we've all seen that aplenty!)

And in a momentous decision for both me and the byways of England, I have decided to do what so many boomers in books and movies have done before me. I have decided to set out on a walk. Why? Because I was made televisually homeless through no fault of my own. Because I have an untreatable condition.

Thus my path will be a journey both physical and mental. But rest assured, as anyone who has ever been lucky enough to be served a dish by me will know, it will not be oversalted. Instead it will be a journey into the Britain I know is out there.

I hate to defend SW but rabbiting was very common amongst rural children/teenagers in the last century. My exh and his siblings (the product of feckless parents who had fled to the country to escape scandal) did it, and sold the rabbits to the local fishmonger and butcher. He saved enough to buy a saddle for his pony. Rabbits are still routinely culled as they eat crops and decimate market gardens, not to mention all that digging leaves holes the livestock can break legs in.

'The Salt Path: Bookshops offer refunds after Raynor Winn scandal ‘disappoints’ customers'

More plagiarism of our threads! I'm disappointed in them, obviously.

'Daunt Books in Marylebone, one of the most popular stores in the capital, said it hadn’t noticed a change in the book’s sales in their store, although one person rang the store to say they were “disappointed’” that the story had been revealed to be different to what was portrayed.'

It wasn't me guv'nor!

Don't disagree - I think it's the way SW told it though - some kind of communing with rabbits story rather than practicalities of farm life.

I admit that its purely hypothetical, but could they defend their actions and the success of TSP as follows:

1. Regarding the embezzlement from the Hemmings. Yes we admit this happened. We have repaid the money stolen but we admit that we were entirely to blame and we are truly sorry.
2. We did lose our house and became homeless. Yes we were to some degree authors of our misfortune. We did have some land in France but it was uninhabitable and not really an option to go and live there in a tent. We didn't have access to the French health system and wouldn't have had access to Moth's tax credits in France.
3. OK we did shift the CBS diagnosis from 2015 to 2013 for literary effect. However, the 2015 diagnosis helped explain what Moth was suffering and therefore he did have CBS at the time of the walk.
4. Moth did get better during the walk although we realise his CBS path is atypical and progresses slowly.
5. The description of the walk is pretty much what happened although most of it was compiled from notes scribbled in the margins of the Paddy Dillon guidebook so there may be a few minor errors here and there.

Well, I've bought a second hand copy on Amazon and am going to take it away with me as schadenfreude holiday reading. The losing the house story struck me as dubious even in the film version before any of this came out, so I will now entertain myself by reading it for clues, discrepancies and so on. I may ring a random bookshop afterwards to tell them how I feel about it.

Yes we cull rabbits on our farm. And yes the rabbit holes are a danger for other livestock.

I think that might have worked @Catwith69lives had it been done instead of the doubling down victim "essay" of last week. What came through in that to me is anger rather than remorse and there is no attempt to address the embezzling, rather to brush it off as accounting mistakes.

I'm not sure Raymoth have a mea culpa in them.

Don't give them ideas! But yes, much of that would likely be swallowed by the masses yet it still wouldn't get around the fact the books are described as unflinchingly honest and non-fiction. Certainly any future print runs should enclose a preface with some disclosure about this.

They’re wisely, and perhaps rightfully at least from a brand management perspective lying low, keeping schtum aside from those two carefully crafted pushbacks, and waiting for the storm to blow over. They have a kind of feral cunning, like a fox, so extreme caution at this stage is probably their smartest move. No doubt they’re surrounded by a tight ring of crisis managers, orchestrating this from behind the scenes.

If they do eventually break cover, I’d expect the full playbook: a bit of mea culpa, some token gesture of recompense to the historically wronged, and a teary joint interview with a sympathetic, soft-gloved interviewer. When that moment comes, it’ll be a sensation no doubt about it whether sweet or salty, depending on the path they choose.

Yes, I’ve no issue with that. I grew up ‘farm-adjacent’ (my grandfather lost the family farm before my mother was born, but they continued to live in the area, and he worked as a labourer on other people’s farms), and grew up killing old chickens for the pot, eating hand-reared calves etc.

We never trapped rabbits (myxomatosis was too recent a memory for my mother’s generation — I first ate rabbit in France aged 18), but Raynor describes her father regularly shooting them to eat during her childhood in a scene in TSP where they’re hungry and camp overnight on a site full of rabbits., and she’s thinking they don’t have enough fuel to cook one even if she could catch it.

For me, trapping rabbits isn’t any indication of psychopath tendencies, just an ordinary farm practice.

Yes been there and seen it!

I used to hang out with hippy types when studying and working in Galway. They certainly weren't short of a bob or two.

It's more the fact she chose to share that particular story to convey her childhood at oneness with nature...seems at odds to me. But yes, standard farm practice and no psychopathic.

Personally, yes.

However, the question is whether future books would be as easy to sell, and whether they could write them - can they write a book that doesn't have 'villain' like Cooper driving the action?

Did people actually need the story of blameless 'people like us' triumphing over adversity?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1031343.stm

Does anyone else remember this scandal from the nineties?

ETA: sorry - 2000

Every time I'm trapped on a long car journey and can't get LBC on my steam-age FM radio, I'm forced to endure Radio 4 including The Archers and lately, they seem to talk about little else but rewilding. It also happens to infuriate my gardening-obsessed friends, who manage something closer to a virtual park on the edge of a mere. They dismiss the whole rewilding trend as the work of lazy gardeners who simply can't be arsed.

I’ve met him a couple of times (actually, once in Galway, come to think of it). The thing is, aside entirely from what he’s doing on his land, or his title or castle, he is a bit of an idiot. One of those international trust fund kids who bimbles about trying film making and land management with a big financial buffer etc. He and his brother were on that insane US reality show where foreign royals or aristocrats go ‘undercover’ as ordinary Americans and learn how to use washing machines and look for love.

Sorry, thread derail.

That’s the perennial problem for musicians who achieve success and remove themselves from the normal structures of daily life. It’s hard to write a blues number that starts with “Woke up this morning, considerably richer than you” and still expect it to have any bite. They could write the true story and how they reacted to this storm they are under - someone would publish it and I'm sure that enough folks would buy it to make it economically worthwhile if that's what it's all about with them - cold hard cash.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/the-salt-path-raynor-winn-allegations-books-b2789402.html

“The conversations that I've had with members of the public tend to be about whether we should be judging someone without really knowing them and there's a lot of press coverage. My personal opinion is the story could still be true. It's the sort of darker backstory that hasn't been revealed until now. One person said: ‘Are we expecting authors to have a perfect life, as well as writing a really good book?’”

Daunt Books in Marylebone, one of the most popular stores in the capital, said it hadn’t noticed a change in the book’s sales in their store, although one person rang the store to say they were “disappointed’” that the story had been revealed to be different to what was portrayed.

“With social media, you'll get very strong opinions one way or the other, and that debate gets carried out there on social media,” Brett Wolstencroft, co-founder and store manager of Daunt Books, said. “But as far as books go, I think people certainly don't react in quite the same way physically as perhaps they do online. I think a lot of people are just waiting and thinking: ‘Time will tell.’”

This got me thinking of something else - how they put all their dramatic eggs in one basket for optimum effect and casting a wide net to catch an audience. Not only are they penniless with no legal aid, then homeless, but Tim is also terminally ill. So TSP has a scattergun approach comprising diverse societal issues including poverty, homelessness, health care, living with terminal illness, and all neatly wrapped up in long distance walking, wild camping and nature. IMO it seems too much for a story. The mantra "less is more" is often cited in story telling. Of course, it clearly worked from a business point of view, but I wonder if a slower approach may have given the books more substance. I suppose the more dramatic it was the more unbelievable it became and everyone likes a true story that seems too unreal to be true. I think that is probably what made it so successful.

Here's Angela's website. Maybe she could make us a little MN item :-) Wonder what that could be/say? 'Here since Day 1' badge? '7 threads' coaster set? 'Salty Sleuths' apron?
https://angelaharding.co.uk/

'I used to be Disappointed but I'm alright now' tote bag? It could become the new secret Mumsnetter code of the haircut and scarf.

I think that bit was intended more to show her deep affinity with the realities of farming, and that she wasn’t a sentimental urbanite cooing over the ickle bunnies. Added to her claims that their Welsh home was an actual ‘farm’ rather than a rather lovely old farmhouse on 1.5 acres, no wonder Bill Cole thought they had actual farm management experience when he offered them the cider farm.

I mean, I appreciate they may have ‘staged’ things when the house appeared on Escape to the Country, as you would, but there’s no evidence at all as the couple and the presenter go around the barn, paddock and outbuildings of it having been run as a smallholding — there doesn’t seem to be any sign of keeping chickens, or growing their own food, and no sheep in the single paddock.

I'm going to give AH 2026 calendars as Christmas presents this year, in solidarity for getting caught up in all this. Her work is beautiful

She said it in response to this question:

Do you think your childhood on a farm has made it easier for you to connect with nature and do you see it as a special place where you experience a sense of belonging?

I don't see trapping rabbits as connecting with nature. Farming yes.