Thread 10: 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...
Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement Raynor Winn
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New posters welcome. It would be helpful to read at least the four Observer items above before posting. There are currently 10 items on The Observer website The real Salt Path | The Observer

To all - No saltiness. Keep to the path. 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 - from experience - this will only encourage them back to the threads. We have done amazingly well together for nine very interesting, very serious and very silly threads so far. I can't be here as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion walking along in a healthy and civil fashion is very welcome.

Keep calm and eat fudge.

Thank you

Someone upthread wanted to check a 2018 edition. There's one on Abe - £24.72 though.

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/Salt-Path-Sunday-Times-bestseller-shortlisted/32251230707/bd

Looks like Gull Rock, near Veryan, in the background. S coast.

I think it's hard to get any real sense of what he's like, because (assuming Raynor is the one solely responsible for the three books) we never get to see him other than presented through a Vaseline-y soft-focus glow of hero worship.

You get glimpses of him as a free-spirited, outdoorsy, blond-plaited 20 year old with eccentric dress sense (am still hoping that a photo of him in the bright cream-coloured suit in which he got married will surface somewhere), but on the rare occasions he engages with people other than Raynor in TSP, he seems more the tiresome, can't-shut-him-up 'raconteur to captive audiences' type:

But he always could tell a good story. He’d told stories in builders’ snap cabins, in queues for the bus, to children on his garden tours, to the visitors in our barn, to anyone who sat still for too long. Captivating people with his tales of everything from history to botany. [...] He’s always had such a loud voice, never one to whisper.

I note that immediately after this comment (which is from when he starts reading Beolwulf in St Ives), Raynor actually acknowledges that 'savvy' people in town for an arts festival are not his usual 'captive audience'.

But on the other hand, he seems to have completely captivated Jason Isaacs, even if we give some leeway for luvvie-ish exaggeration.

But yes, I don't think he has had anything like a 'career trajectory'. Casual jobs in construction, or jobs he talked his way into.

Yes, I think that’s spot on. The unusual charisma means it’s extra devastating when he apparently told farm owner he’d been told not to make extra Christmas plans. Awful in any context though of course.

Definitely captured Jason - he's almost IzSalRay's rival:

He's the most lovely person I've ever met. Everyone who ever meets him falls completely in love with him.
Jason Isaacs Worked Closely With the Remarkable Real-Life Man Behind 'The Salt Path' Adaptation

Ah, the rootless charismatic wanderer without malice & down on his luck, am sure we’ve all known a few. Them against the evil capitalist world except when it comes to paying your gas bill or chipping in for food when you’re short. They’ll pick you a flower outside to remind you of their undying love.

Good quote ‘Captivating people’ yet when Grant goes off on some exaggerated tale of making it with only 10 pence in pocket against odds he’s cut down sharply by wife & exposed as deceitful, exaggerating charlatan, albeit with light touch.

He made quite a bit with the Beowulf in short space of time.

https://emmaus.org.uk/cornwall/raynor-winn-in-conversation/

Was just thinking they should’ve made JI their PR person. 😂

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/signed-first-edition/Salt-Path--PATH-TRILOGY-SIGNED-FIRST/32233008004/bd

Thanks for the link to the Oscar Burton article - an excellent, forensic analysis which still manages to be balanced. Apart from his waspish summation of the book: 'a cardinal crime against English literature'. Tee hee.

The tent they bought (for £34 on eBay) had only been used once according to the account in TSP. This is believable - I bought my last one man tent on eBay from somebody who had only used it once.

Half of the writing correspondant team chiming in - if books have been quite heavily edited by different people that might account for why Chat GPT thinks that they are written by different authors (that and ChatGPT is a pile of shit). I have changed publishers three times during my writing career and with a few of my books from a different publisher (and therefore more heavily edited as they wanted to bring them into line with their 'brand') you'd be hard pressed to tell who they were written by.

So I'm not placing any faith in ChatShit telling me that these books are written by different people. EDITED by different people, yes, I can believe that.

Wow, a doctor at a routine appointment said after he’d fallen through roof of barn and ache hadn’t gone ‘that’s not arthritis, it’s a fatal neurological condition’. Some bedside manner.

Also struck by ‘they’re not self indulgent people. They don’t think about themselves’ etc.

The original Michael Joseph edition would have been in hardback, with the Penguin paperback edition following a year later, as is standard.

What I had hoped to get out of the book was a dying man's insight on the 'path from life to death'. But it just wasn't there. The book was devoid of any meaningful wisdom. It was an empty vessel.

Please share if you do @Divegirl65!

I don't have my TSP copy anymore (bought from and returned to a charity shop) but it could be interesting to add in dates from the story for the places they rocked up.

For the record, my copy definitely referred to Moth as Ray, this is not a Mandela effect. I re-read the sentence a few times and was baffled. Something like "Moth, a nickname from his eco warrier days, but his real name is Ray." And nothing more on it.

As we head into the weekend, here is a bit of an existential question.

Are there any aspects, critical facts that have been unearthed in the last ten MN threads on this topic that the mainstream media haven't, as yet, latched onto, which, even if they don't change the trajectory of the story, would add colour to any follow up piece(s)?

Is the state of the Welsh farmhouse in 1992 vs what is described in TSP, material? What about the medical observations in the 2015 consultant's letter vs what is described in TSP? Has the mainstream media missed any critical aspects of this story? Is the pigeonnier angle over played? 😀

Here's a couple that have occurred to me:
-- TW's background: some on here have opined about his lack of career trajectory, and whether he might have come from a monied/ inheritance/ trust fund background.
-- Nobody has picked up on the disparity between the Rick Stein programme featuring them on the cider farm, where they were shown picking & talking about the apples ('the blush' ...), shown making the cider (inaccurately - no pressing cloth on the straw 'cheese') and drinking the raw apple juice etc, and Bill Cole reported as saying that no cider was made during their tenure, and the orchards were left to go wild.
-- The Oscar Burton blog post (link kindly provided above by TheBrandyPath) is the only one that points out the first consultant's letter provided by RW in her rebuttal of The Observer's first piece post-dates TSP walk by 2 years.
-- Absolutely no supporting, character-reference type comments, interviews or on social media, of the pair by friends or family. None. Zero Zilch.

ETA: typos

Going to your q. in the 2nd para. After the previous sharing of how they met. I have thought that, at the 6th form college, she may have been doing a clerical/bookkeeping course. Apprentices used to come in on day release if they were doing plastering, decorating, etc. His style looks quite country life/private school - but if he worked for a family firm he may have wanted to learn the relevant skills thoroughly for himself.

And anyway, unless @Flyagaricc has got hold of a copy of "How Not to Dal dy Dir", they'll be using the sample in the public domain, which is two or three paragraphs of the narrator sitting on the toilet. Surely any good comparison would require more material to come up with a reliable analysis?

@Choux I think this is taken at Lantic Bay - so the nearest bit of the SWCP to where they had settled at Polruan. It is probably just a photo opportunity to go with the article?

Tim's late father had one sibling,a sister. She went on to marry a Mr Cooper.

Could be Constantine looking towards booby’s (north Cornwall, south of padstow)

I vaguely assumed she was doing A levels or some other course, and that he was probably doing construction studies/apprentice day release or something in that vein.

I don't know about family wealth. Obviously it wouldn't be mentioned in the books, as it would destroy the 'alone and destitute' narrative, but nothing of the tiny bits of information we do get about his earlier life when they were first together suggests much wealth to me? Apart from anything else, I assume her parents would have been less unimpressed by him if his family were wealthy, even if he was a 'townie'.

They both seem to have been living at home when they were at college -- in one scene in TWS they are in Moth's bedroom, skipping college, having clearly just had sex, after only a few months together. He waves topless out the window at 'the old lady over the road' of whom he says 'I've been waving to her all my life', which suggests the bedroom is in his family home, rather than a shared/student house.

We know he doesn't drive initially, as it's one of the criticisms her parents have of him, and they drive out to the Roaches in Raynor's 'tiny, battered Fiat.' She also says 'neither of us earned enough money to travel abroad'. W In literally the only mention of Moth's parents I can think of, she says his father drove them to the railway station when they went to camp in Scotland, and was aware of the lie Raynor has told her parents (that she's going on holiday with Moth's entire family, and will have her own room), because he asks what he should do if her parents phone the Walker house. He's described as wearing a flat cap.