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...

Thread One ^www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5368194-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?^

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

Thread 3 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5369425-thread-3-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 4 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5370609-thread-4-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

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

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.

AH hasn’t renamed The Wild Silence.
https://angelaharding.co.uk/products/cornish-path-wild-silence-boxed-notecard-set

I think this is why I have found the last few days so fascinating.

I couldn't get past the first story about the debt, because I hate that kind of vagueness about accountancy/bookkeeping - but I appreciate that is a bit niche.

I then found the news stories and interviews about terminal illness 'triggering' because I found that neat narrative harmful, because of personal experience.

But the whole thing is a lesson in understanding that different people react differently!

ETA: the insights on the threads re the music industry, the publishing industry, farming, rewilding etc. etc. have also been fascinating!

I suppose it's not as well known though? The main controversy is around the Salt Path

Definitely agree that the advantage was all on the writer's side - I picked the book up in Waterstones purely because I saw the cover and thought it was by/about Angela Harding. Read the blurb, thought it looked interesting, read the opening and a few paragraphs in the middle and realised it wasn't for me after all.

IF they can't find the 2013 letter confirming the CBD diagnosis, then I don't see that they've got much choice but to issue some sort of mea culpa. If they don't, then they are faced with the risk that they will be asked this awkward question by somebody in the audience at any promotional literary event that they attend in the future. Unless,of course, all types of Q&A are banned.....

Just one more thing, as Columbo would say: the 2015 medical letter. Something else just dawned on me to support it was the first time CBS was ever mooted. The Dr writes that in the consultation he told Timoth about the PSP Society charity to get more information on CBS but that it would pertain to much more severe cases. If Timoth already knew he had CBS/D in 2013 with a 2 year prognosis, why would he need information about it in 2015?

If CBD/S had already been diagnosed in 2013, why would TW have been referred by a pain clinic to a neurology unit in 2015 and no mention be made in the letter of any previous diagnosis?

Was the CBS/D diagnosis in 2015 the "spark" which caused SW to write TSP in the first place?

I'm quite certain the 2013 letter, if it exists, will be knocking around some NHS system somewhere, or at least an indication it existed. Medical notes have the date diagnoses are given on them (in my experience). It's up to them but if I were in their position I would be tracking it down with all possible speed and energy.

The embezzlement wouldn't be as easy to get round.

I feel quite sure that if CBS had been mooted prior to the 2015 consultation, the consultant would have made some reference to it, if only to say that yes, this fits with that picture; or well, this is progressing much more slowly than most.

@CheerybleBrothers we’ve got an awful lot of this kind of person down here in Somerset. Bumble about doing a bit of something because they have trust fund money or inheritances or made a packet at one point in the city or from a TV series etc etc - problem with RayMoth is that I think they wanted and felt entitled to that kind of bohemian lifestyle without the back up funds of the average trust funder . I suspect seeing his brothers set up made them feel hard done by . Ironically they have it now- whether they can hang on to it is another thing -

I think sone people won’t care about the date of diagnosis, as long as there was a diagnosis, on the grounds that if he was symptomatic, he did have the condition 2 years earlier and they might well have been very concerned about what the symptoms meant.

That part of the story might not be strictly accurate, but it might be enough that the ‘vibes’ seem true.

Obviously many people do care, but I don’t know whether that is enough to spur them into action.

But culling pests is 'connecting with nature', just not in a way people who might think of nature as something you engage with in your leisure time would necessarily find acceptable.

There's this bit in TSP:

I contemplated hunting rabbits. It would be nothing new: Dad and I had shot rabbits, hundreds of them, as they ate the corn in swathes, destroying a whole year’s crop in a week. We filled the freezer, sold them to butchers, made stews, pies, skewers, pâtés, soups, sandwiches, until no one could face rabbit again. I lay in the darkness thinking about making a snare, but had neither the energy or enough gas to cook a rabbit if I caught one. I woke in the night to the sound of them tearing and chewing grass. From the volume of the snuffling, it could have been a big stew.

(For other people living in the vicinity of where she grew up, foxhunting would have been another, entirely ordinary, traditional way of connecting with nature via pest control. It's hunting central, traditionally, around those parts -- the Cottesmore, the Fernie, Quorn, Belvoir, etc. But as emotions run far higher around hunting, I imagine that even if Raynor had had a horsy kind of childhood and hunted, her editor would have suggested leaving that out.)

I think so. The content of the letter all points to it.

I can imagine.

I remember thinking there was a very weird entitlement to a passage in The Wild Silence, when they're apparently contemplating whether they can 'trust' Bill Cole on the cider farm offer, that goes something like 'Moth needed a wild, green life, but not stress, or complexity, or problems, Just the simplicity of a life in nature.'

Which reads very oddly indeed from the daughter of a tenant farmer who has supposedly run her own farm in Wales. Since when has life on a farm not involved stress, complexity and problems?

Yeah, but not the way she talks about connecting with nature. Culling pests isn't really connecting with nature anyway, it's a practice for human benefit. Farming is not connecting with nature, it's really modification of nature (I'm not saying what's right or wrong btw). But this is besides the point and going off-topic. Sally was merely saying she blocked rabbit holes in wood (where she listened to birds and the wind) to trap them in the sense of stopping them going into the holes so she could, I assume from the context, admire them. She's not talking about killing them.

Agree. It's a very Country Living view of living in/with the countryside.

And I think that's what they felt they were somehow owed. Only neither of them appears to have had a husband running a hedge fund or a family who could lend them the dowager house, iykwim.

It's either a poor night or this thread (or a combo of both) but just had my grocery shopping delivered and the driver, lovely guy, was the spitting image of MothTim.

I resisted the temptation to say "hi Simon".

Yeah, that's how I feel. I am not too worried about the chronology. I was symptomatic long before diagnosis and wouldn't see it as wrong to describe myself as having my condition at that time as I did have it (I just didn't know it)

My only issue is with the misrepresentation of walking as some sort of miracle cure, and the irresponsibility of doing that and the harm it causes.

@AldoGordo, but 'nature' itself is a human construct. Obviously the non-human world exists, but the ways in which we have conceptualised it have changed hugely according to time, place and context eg Romanticism's ideas about 'wild' nature as solace/an encounter with the sublime etc arising as a response to the Age of Enlightenment's rationalisation of nature and the Industrial Revolution's idea of it as a place from which resources are extracted etc etc.

I think RW's construction of nature in TSP and its sequels is a mishmash of post-Romantic and post-environmental movement, with a dash of 'hippy free spirit' and 'farmer's daughter/farmer in her own right with traditional skills' etc.

I don't think it's particularly well thought through, or, in fairness, intended to be. I mean, she's not coming at it from a specific philosophical perspective, or via a history of thought, like Robert MacFarlane. (Though interesting that she, like him, has moved into working with musicians.)

Perhaps Moth will become a latter-day Lord Lucan, and will appear periodically in blurry phone photos as an Elvis impersonator in Vegas, under a bridge in Wolverhampton, an Ocado delivery guy ('Your today delivery will be by Moth in the Cabbage Van!'), or walking past behind Orla Guerin as she talks to camera from a warzone etc etc.

You should have asked him for a quick rendition!

Ooh if we put him in a black and red stripe jumper we could have our very own live action where's Wally. Where's Mothy has a ring to it!

A Tory MP has referenced TSP at PMQs. Comparing Keir’s manifesto and TSP and calling them a pack of lies. 🤣🤣

This is very true, and thanks for some perspective. I'm not huge fan of the term "nature connection" TBH. I don't see it having much meaning. It seems to be so fluid as to be meaningless, or at least not useful language. I mean in its purist form "connecting with nature" would arguably mean surviving by hunting and foraging ike our ancestors did, semi naked and even without fire. That said, I can understand why "nature connection" has become a topic in our culture given the pressures and growth of urban and technological-centric society that seems to limit or distract us from experiencing "nature".