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.

Or "I was down to my last lei, time to ingratiate myself with yet another pre- revolution Romanian landowner" 😆

Also...I know we all love to retrospectively
diagnose neurodiversity nowadays, but his account of his schooldays just screams ADHD to me.

A Time of Gifts is probably my favourite travelogue ever).

You can hire her for a private book signing and Q &A,only £1000 for an hour.

Who does she think is going to take her up on that? Independent bookshops, libraries, reading groups, small local literary festivals, don't have that kind of money to splash around.

If you want to put on an event, there are plenty of reputable authors who will turn up to events just to meet readers and hope to flog a few books, maybe in return for travel expenses and a glass of plonk.

Don't think so, they wouldn't have pulled Snowdonia out of thin air, or Tim Walker.

OK if it was after TSP was published he might have been trying to make sure the other students weren't impacted by his fame. It was a couple of years before though.

ETA on thinking, might be different if he were born in Snowdonia, but he wasn't. I live nowhere near where I was born or where I was brought up but I would in these circumstance say where I lived now, unless specifically asked where I was from originally and even that doesn't apply here.

What is also interesting is that Hendy-Freegard also had a connection to France and was convicted of attempting to run over 2 gendames and sentenced to 6 years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4zp1n89j5o

Interlude

A short observation on petty theft:

More or less every year in our small town there is a kind of green, environmental festival. They leave behind a lot of spray paint on the pavements and poo on the beach but their most peculiar behaviour is:

Stealing one raw egg out of a carton in the supermarket.

I have absolutely no explanation for why they do this. It's not battery eggs, can be any kind of egg but they make off with one raw egg. You get to the checkout and realise that your eggs are slightly light on one corner.

Maybe they are militant vegans and I've lost subtlety of thought here but it only happens when they are in town. Correlation is not causation but it's a thing.

I've searched the internet for how this might be a recognised egg liberation movement but nobody can help. All I have is the testimony of the manager of Super U and several cashiers saying that it happens and you have to specially check egg boxes during that week.

It actually looks more to me like someone moved it there as a joke, as it’s not in alphabetical order (in the ‘B’ section when it should be filed in ‘W’, for ‘Winn’). Also, why is it the only book facing outwards, when it’s not a new release?

The Sunday Times nominated TSP as one of the best 100 books published in tbe last 50 years.

Seriously??

When I think of some of the books I've read, and compare...well, any of them with TSP. My eyes just don't roll enough for that nomination.

If they weren't securing a charge it's vanishingly unlikely you'd have been able to obtain them from land registry so I think we can knock that suggestion away pretty swiftly.

Do you mean they weren't from the land registry? Because they were - that's where Chloe got the documents from, she says this in the interview.

I just think it's interesting that she admits to googling the wrong solicitor and not realising til after the event and the wrong solicitor not pointing out the fact that they were not the person she was looking for and Chloe not establishing that. It kind of points to a less than forensic dive (viz. the wrong French property they published in the original story).

It also speaks to the approach she took with the medical experts she contacted for the story who gave general views: 'this is unlikely', 'I've never seen this', vs the actual neurologists who actually examined Tim/Moth (one of whom told them the charity PSPA , for those with PSP and CBD, would be helpful for his condition).

I feel like there's some conjecture and some facts and I can see why there's a push-back on the story from commentators (outside of MN!)

If you already have a degree, no you can't apply for a student loan. Well, you can apply, but you're not going to get.

In a previous thread, someone pointed out that there was a botanist called Tim Walker who's the same age as this one, so I think he probably heard about this guy and appropriated his degree for himself.

And that's what helped him get the gardener job at Plas yn Rhiw. Because it's in the article about those gardens that it's mentioned.

I'm only suggesting it because my experience is that this is the kind of fact that local papers sometimes get wrong - 'Llyn Peninsula - yes North Wales - yes Snowdonia is in North Wales' accidentally becomes 'from Snowdonia'.

It is after all the Falmouth Packet, not the Western Mail.

Hope Chloe H writes it one day! Maybe that’s her plan, if she has enough material. A bit like the Belle Gibson exposé book written by Beau Donelly.

Can’t help but wonder if Moth had a chronic urge to not be seen as a bit second rate asset wise compared to his brother and felt the need to ‘keep up’ I find men in particular can be very aware of this , especially ones who see themselves as ‘middle class’. - even the hippy types

Blimey! Most authors do this for free in order to push book sales.

It's a misleading description in Amazon.

The list is of the 100 best selling books of the last 50 years.

(viz. the wrong French property they published in the original story).

It was a pic of the pigeon loft and not the house further away. Yes, you're right that it was less than forensic, but it wasn't completely the wrong property, they were in the same plot. I wonder if she took a few pics, but the paper went with that one.

And yes, if I were her I wouldn't be saying she googled the wrong solicitor and ended up talking to a random person!

Probably booked out by journalists

I'd hazard a guess that it's the easiest way of stealing breakfast, an egg concealed in your hand is better than a box of them up your jumper, and if a group of friends do it then they can share an omelette!

To placemats from the last thread: I got the name of the beach wrong. It is indeed Portheras. I don't know why I said Penberth- maybe because I've got a print of Penberth on the kitchen wall 🤦‍♀️

It would be interesting to hear from someone who’s done that course. It seems to be offered by Cornwall College in tandem with the Eden project. The HND/Bsc is accredited by the University of Plymouth but I don’t think otherwise they have anything to do with it.

I can see that the money would have been useful! At that stage they presumably had no idea how popular the book was going to be. But I’d not be surprised if he also wanted to do the course just to have a degree to his name. Particularly if he left school to become a plasterer. Maybe that matters a lot to him?

The Wainwright Prize. On the first shortlist in 2014 Simon Armitage (him again) was nominated for 'Walking Home' about his trek on the Pennine way. In 2018 RW was for TSP.

It has expanded a lot since then with more categories but as far as I can see, she hasn't made the shortlist for her other 2 books. Maybe there has been an expansion in nature/conservation writing. The prize money is only a few thousand but I wonder if it's a coincidence that On Winter Hill is about the Coast to Coast path which was devised by Alfred Wainwright, who I think is the Household God of fell walkers.

Hmm, yes. When they were living in the chapel flat in Polruan….

People have noted Timoth's dapper appearance and it reminds me that I once saw Julian Barrett (of The Mighty Boosh fame) buying a coffee in Pret when I was in there. He looked superb in a very dashing, Mellors-the-gamekeeper kind of way, in a big coat and a waistcoat and iirc a sort of cravat affair. Strangely like Moth Winn/Tim Walker, in fact. There’s something very actor-y and well-put-together about him. A lot of thought's gone into that image. I wonder how different it would all have been if he’d looked like Roy from Coronation Street?

It's number 37.

For comparison Twilight is 42 and The Little Book of Calm is 28.

However it's calculated by number of weeks in the charts, not total book sales.

It's not much different to the house raffle tbh. In both situations it required people to buy a self-published book in advance and a house was never going to be won.

Actually, about that pigeon loft...

I thought it odd that it was his brother who owned it, and now someone has said it was the one who owned the chateau.

I wonder if it was a plot with house and loft but they couldn't afford both, so the brother said he'd buy the loft and a bit of land as long as it was in his name.

Enabling them to buy the house with a bit of land. So one large plot became two smaller ones.

What I also wonder, if the brother owns the loft and, presumably, is paying taxes on it, why couldn't the mayor find the Walkers that way?

More like 100k given timeframe.