Thread 9: 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 ...

2nd Observer https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-whats-in-the-book-and-what-the-observer-has-found

3rd Observer https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-the-truth-behind-the-blockbuster-book-video

4th Observer ‘I felt I was being gaslit’ – the landlord who helped Ray...

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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 extremely cautious when it comes to naming or implicating people and addresses not in the public eye or with no direct connection to the story, and around the understandable health speculations, especially where details are unclear or still emerging. Please do not engage with visitors who seem to have their own agenda and seek to derail. Avoid @'ing and quoting them as this will only encourage them back to the threads.

We have done amazingly well together - in the main that is, not mentioning any names but you know who you are! - for eight threads so far. I can't be on the threads as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion ticking along in a healthy and civil fashion is very welcome.

No saltiness. Keep to the path. Thank you.

As we all (but one) thought, then.

It certainly ties in doesn’t it, the lack of respect for other people and their property (while having been quite comfortable to purchase their own house, plus land in France, plus running a holiday business)

Remarkable degree of cognitive dissonance

Not sure if this interview in Oct 2018 with SW has been shared before. Some interesting insights into her relationship with her mother and feminism.

Interview: Raynor Winn – The Bookery

PM

"By the time I reached the end my thoughts had changed, the story had slapped me around the face. It was as strongly feminist as any book could be: not by suggesting that men are the enemy, but that women are. That there’s nothing stopping us having anything we want, other than our own acceptance of our situation"

WTF? The Women's Room does not bloody suggest that women are the enemy.

Did she even read it to the end?!

I don't want to be a killjoy, but it is actually illegal to download and also to share pirated PDF copies of books.

Much as I dislike what Winn has done, I am afraid this is a form of theft. Authors lose income. It is soul destroying to have your hard work given away for free like this.

Welcome @FarmerPilesofJam . Sorry I missed your debut post yesterday. It's hard to keep up with this chatty lot, especially when talk of scones is needed. Are you qualified to be our Farming Correspondent?

That is an interesting point about possible sheep subsidies. I'm not sure how many sheep SalTim ever had. I think only one is mentioned on the Accidental Smallholder forum by 'Gangani', there is a deceased one in the Dal dy Dir book and potentially they are both the same one that appears as 'deceased very elderly sheep' in TSP. One and a half acres including the buildings doesn't give much land for farming sheep, does it, unless they rented more land locally?

After listening to the Hemmings, it doesn't seem like Salray is too bothered about parting folks who can't afford it from their money. They seem to have posted in quite a few places to try to promote the book/raffle. Like you I can't imagine they got a lot of takers from the smallholders' forum. The post by 'Karen Smith' on the American/Welsh site a pp has linked to might have brought in more takers.

After a year of working with sheep as a youngster, I can confirm that it does indeed give you soft hands. All that free lanolin.

Having a small holding of approx 1.5 acres does not qualify anyone to be a cider farmer.
Agreed, as Bill Coles seems to have found out to his peril. I think SalTim had fruit trees on their 1.5 acres but I don't know what they were or what they did with them.

Our fudge might be more cash and carry Costco than farmhouse country kitchen but I hear that our Fudge Correspondent hopes to have an alpaca. Like geese, they can make excellent guard dogs, so we might just be ok if any light-fingered w/Walkers pass by!

ETA the @ as the quoted post seems to have disappeared from the top.

The podcast I’m listening to from March 2019 RW states categorically she’d never written anything before not even an article.

Before the Gangani adventure there is this episode of Escape to the Country in 2011. Some posters have commented on whether there is enough room under the stairs and so on, but I can’t get my head around the sheer weirdness of the programme.
To clear the debts and pay off the remaining mortgage the house was put up for sale in 2010 for 395K. This was far too high for that type of property at the time. Average prices would have been around 250K, so it’s no wonder there weren’t any takers. Now if only they could have it featured on Escape to the Country, that would surely find them some buyers… But how to go about that? You need a cunning plan… so this is what I think happened:
In preparation they raised the asking price to 435K. Then they ‘found’ a couple of retired accountants from London to knock on the door of Escape to the Country with a budget of 450K and a wishlist that would weed out all competing properties in the area. Hence the husband oddly insisting on having his personal bathroom… So the producers look for suitable properties and lo and behold they find the dream house in the middle of the preferred area. Imagine their relief! The couple are shown around pretending not to know anything about the property until we come to the interesting bit of them having to guess the market price. ‘Oh I can’t imagine it being anything less than 450K’ she says. His guess? 430K. Then, even though the property is ticking all the boxes, it has to stay on the market so the husband pretends not to be too enthousiastic and in the closing moments we learn that the couple has not chosen one of the three options but bought ‘a’ house in the area.
Dear MN sleuths, could you please have another look at that video on YouTube called ‘Escape to the Country 12 x 3 Wales’ which was broadcast in November 2011. This time don’t look for hidey holes under the stairs but concentrate on the couple, what they say and how they say it. Who are they? How good are make-up artists? Who wrote the script?

It won't let me play the clip.
What are you implying?

Thanks for your post, Pandora. I’m so sorry - I hadn’t realised it was illegal to share. I thought it was okay as it’s already in the public domain. I’ll report my post to MN now so they can delete it. Sorry.

Thanks❤️

I didn't mean to sound so shirty! I know lots of people don't realise the legalities.

Whilst we don't want to do anything illegal on these threads and I agree with Pandora about other authors, I don't think many of us would be too bothered about this particular author losing out on more royalties.

Have you tried clicking on the link at the bottom of the post rather than on the video arrow?

Remind me which podcast that is please?

@PandoraSocks I was a bit baffled by her take on The Women's Room as well. It is - let's say - an unusual reading to interpret its lesson as being: you should run off with a glamorous man whom your mother hates, and everything will be OK. Ah well, I've taught in universities for long enough to know that, whatever we teach, students learn the oddest things!

@Witharelle I am loving this theory. I've got my mum hooked now and we're discussing it over the lunch table

Sally Ann Winn and Timothy Ronald Walker were married in Portree in 1986.
Just wondering why they chose to get wed in Scotland?

Agree with this having now finished the book. The lasagne and massage episode: she could easily have been angry at him for the idea that he's cheated on her with the attractive women he goes off for the massage with. Instead she wails at him about how she's fat and ugly now and he doesn't want her anymore and when he says he was just teasing about the women she calls him a git or similar. She seems insecure about losing him, and not just to illness and death.

Other random questions:
Why when they do get money don't they buy some sunscreen at last? In the final section we're back to nose peeling and leathery skin.

Did Moth continue to carry the radio the whole way? It's never mentioned again after the Ashes.

If Moth is a 'trained master plasterer' that should be a form of work you could pick up in most places. And where you could be paid in cash, based on my experience at any rate. Yet he's too ill for that but not for walking and wild camping.

Late on they say 'we revisited the consultant' - so did they return to Liverpool, and if so how? Just beforehand they'd had to borrow money from their kids to get the train to Polly's. The consultant won't believe that walking could be healing Moth. Bet he felt like a fool when the book came out, eh? 🤔

Not at all! I completely understand.

I think this might be stretching things a bit :) to have them as master of disguises too..,

However, imaginative take so a few comments.

1. Jamal is seemingly Asian
2. Jamal does have Moth like verve & flair, humour & build/height
3. Are Raymoth artists? Quite a studio shown. Who engaged illustrator for TSP? All arranged via Penguin? Cover artist seemingly distanced self fast, Writers I know of do like to build some form of relationship with illustrators but heard since on here, uncommon
4. House is very tastefully decorated so Raymoth have good taste & creative flair
5. I think a stretch to imply Diana aka Dee the retired accountant (?) Ray - Dee has the carriage & RP voice of an actress perhaps
6. Dee & Jamal seem atypical accounts
7. Escape to the Country would check the veracity of their contributors

Just been reading on Google and libraries do pay a small royalty to authors but second hand book sellers don't (unless they have signed up to a scheme called Author Share).

Also, just got a copy of the illustrated version of Wilding by Isabella Tree - a lot of the illustrations are by Angela Harding and they are really beautiful.

If they revisited the consultant there should be another letter...

I will also volunteer as tv correspondent, as these are exactly the kinds of programmes that I used to make (!).

And I don't think they would have been able to be that manipulative to get someone to volunteer and get the programme made for all sorts of reasons, including timings and the way that people tend to get recruited. It might have happened, but given their fecklessness with the lottery idea, I don't think they are that clever*.

But I do agree with people's characterisation of their relationship, I've met a couple of women like this, absurdly grateful that this person has deigned to look at them (one had a v highflying career and was clearly much more able than the good looking but average husband).

*I think that this is a kind of Occam's razor which could be applied to quite a few of the theories on here. Does it require them to be quite clever to do this? If so, unlikely. I don't think they planned most of this, they had a lot of failed ideas, this one took off and then became so big it was out of control. And here we all are.