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
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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.

*sorry I got that wrong, she was titrated over several months

"An animal that can't speak" got me. 😂. It's a pattern- Moth rarely has a voice both in the book(s) and in publicity.

ETA: in fact he comes across as a person with no agency or ability to make his own decisions, just dragged along with whatever RW decides. It's been raised before on the threads that this hiding in the background seems like a ploy.

@Orangesandlemons77 to be fair to them, it’s over a few days I think but what you say makes sense. TSP:

“I can put one foot in front of the other and trust where it’ll land. I am not dropping things as often…My shoulder too it’s not as painful. It was really bad when I stopped taking the pregabalin, but somewhere before Newquay I realised I wasn’t feeling it as much. It’s been years since it’s felt this good & my heads so much clearer; I can think straight..I don’t know if it will all come back the moment I stop walking”.

“Before Newquay? Probably Kurt’s herbal remedies”.

Who needs conventional drugs, hey…

At the beginning of the Salt Path, when Raynor is setting up the idea that they were homeless and had no alternative but to walk, there are some quotes that I found interesting:
"the only accommodation they could offer at that moment was a room in a bed and breakfast that housed mainly those with drug and alcohol problems... I can’t imagine living in a council house down the road from the farm. That would be just soul-destroying. Not only that, but in such a tight-knit rural community we would be the source of gossip for months."
So their egos prevented them from accepting council accommodation, if only to use as a base to get clean and wash their clothes etc. while they did walks. Their homelessness was self inflicted then.
"Long-term camping was an option until we could find something better... No one we knew had a room to spare, or a garden they were willing to sacrifice for more than a few weeks. Moth’s brother was on holiday so we could use his house, but we had just two weeks before he came back with his family, then there wouldn’t be room for us all and we would have to leave."
Out of all the people they knew, friends, their parents, family, there wasn't one person who would put them up, or even let them camp in their garden, including Tim's brother, whose house they are in at this point, so they are presumably on ok terms, and who also owns a property in France? What does this say about them?
I'm wondering if they were just on the run and didn't want to register themselves anywhere because of all the debt they had accumulated.

Different brother I'm assuming. He has 2 (hope I'm allowed to say that).

@OpenThatWindow exactly.

To let someone groan in pain all night in a country like the UK with free healthcare when they knew they'd forgotten his pain medication is quite frankly abuse. I can't believe anyone would read that passage in the book and not think the same (or of course realsie that it was a complete lie).

I didn't read the books and I haven't seen the film. The book was recommended to me but I hate the genre / trend of books / influencers etc saying 'eat this food item' 'do that eg go on a walk' and you'll be cured of whatever serious disease. I can tell I'd have been annoyed very soon if I had read it from the excerpts I have seen: such purple prose puts me off.

@FlyAgaricc this bit struck me “we would be the source of gossip for months”…Oh dear. This really does all feel like, despite their millions now, some form of karmic cautionary tale. I think & hope they’ll both emerge just fine in end that said.

NB: Tim has 2 brothers.

Oh ok

Why would living in a council house trigger gossip? Millions of people live in council houses; it's nothing special or degrading - in fact, there are extremely long waiting lists for them.

Such snobs!

Also, why fear of gossip when they were innocent victims? People do have empathy, even local people in local villages, whom they would have known for 20ish years! Oh, except the embezzlement thing.

I think she might have been worried about other things triggering local gossip. This sort of stilted disdain is apparently liberally handed out on path to wards them, bristling Hyacinth Buckets holding their noses at unwashed beggars etc.

If they'd embezzled £64K from the Hemmings, left a couple of local garage owners significantly out of pocket, it's a fair bet that they would already be subject to a certain amount of 'local gossip', irrespective if they moved from a £435K house in the countryside to a council house!

They are snobs. Found this sentence quite snobby: "A girl with dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail sat behind a desk in the council offices, speaking to us in a strong Welsh accent."

Something tells me that SalRay especially is of the opinion that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Well think she knows why they would be the source of local gossip, but not just for having a council house..

I wouldn't pretend to have a very well informed opinion; I retired a few years ago, I've never been a neurologist, and I don't remember ever meeting a patient with CBS/CBD. (Parkinson's, yes, and other parkinson-like diseases).

But my vaguely-medically informed opinion is that TW has an atypical form of something along those lines. I see nothing to dispute the idea that "something" is going on. (We've seen mention of a scan showing depleted dopamine levels in the brain). Parkinson's disease has been recognised for over 200 years but the other similar syndromes are more newly recognised and I suspect there's still a lot of research and learning that needs to be done to understand them better. However atypical presentations of all sorts of illnesses are actually quite common.

If you have a relatively unusual illness, then a rare presentation of it, of course will potentially cause a lot of uncertainty and confusion.

So SW may well be correct in her rebuttal; he has a neurological illness. But it's certainly not running the usual course and my personal opinion is that the WalkerWinns have been wrong to make out that he's at death's door with this.

However I also understand that when you get a potentially serious diagnosis, your mind can definitely leap to the worst possible scenario and so she may be totally truthful in how scared she and TW were at the idea of CBS.

I think that any serious illness, especially one where there is little active treatment but a poor outlook, can make a person feel totally out of control. The idea that you can regain some control somehow is very attractive. Hence the frantic hunt for unlikely "cures" that you see many people doing. In the WalkerWinn's case, that "cure" is the physical exertion. Someone with a typical Parkinson's-like disease would be getting streadily worse and be unable to do these long walks; but TWs illness is atypical so maybe the benefits he gets from extreme exercise do help his symptoms. (Also of course, serious physical illness can make you feel depressed; depression can make you slow down; exercise, or taking an active control can make you feel less depressed; and improving your mental health will make you feel more generally better).

I can't explain or understand the discrepancy between scans that she reports (ie that the walk normalised a previous abnormal scan). In my view either she's lying; or hearing/seeing what she wants to hear/see; or the scan has been wrongly reported. I'm not in a position to comment on which of these is the likeliest!

And I haven't read TSP for about 6 years so I can't comment on specifics in the book coz I don't remember them!

I also don't think many coming across them would even think 'oh they're homeless' when seeing a middle aged couple on a walking path.

You'd think hardened hikers, charity challengers, rural holiday couple, wild campers - but not immediately homeless couple, here because they have no where else to go.

If she thought she came across prejudice, I wonder how much of that was projected and imagined.

If they even did.

Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I'm going down the garden to eat worms.

Excellent insights for which many thanks.

Any thoughts about the possible discrepancy between the 2013 diagnosis of terminal CBD described in TSP and the consultant's letter from 2015 mentioning possible atypical and mild CBS/CBD?

That's Sally, that is.

@FlyAgaricc I agree; that sounds snobby to me too.

I just listened to SW/RW reading some of her purple prose and her own accent isn't exactly like the Queen's English is it. So weird she wrote that, also about the girl's hair it sounds so disdainful.

I always thought it was a very weird comment. I mean, they’re in Wales — what kind of accent is someone working for the local council most likely to have?

One of the reasons these threads are so gripping is because, outside a particularly (really) (really) odd fan fic would anyone put the Poet Laureate, Dana Scully, Lucius Malfoy, Martin Kemp of Spandau and Rick Stein in the same space?

But here they are. With so, so much more.

Half of the Reddit hiking board thought that all the surprised or awestruck comments about them being ‘old’ were very unlikely, given the average age of a lot of LD walkers.