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

Booked in to this evening's Chloe H interview!

Just switching back to TSP for a moment, I've got a couple of questions (apologies if covered before)

• when did TW's brother move to France permanently? Presumably after 2013 when they stayed in his house for a while?
• where did their post get redirected to while they were on the walk? Their brother? After 2016 the person who bought Pen y maes was receiving mail meant for them
• They had a follow up appointment in Oct 2013 with the same consultant they saw in July 2013. How would this have worked? Would the consultant have set this up when he saw them originally? If so, why were neither of these 2 appointments subsequently mentioned in the 2015 letter published on SW's website?

I agree. I don't buy the distrust, particularly because I don't buy that people "recoiled" when they said they were "homeless." Moreover, they quickly made up a story to hide their "homelessness". And, anyway their "homelessness" was arguably a walking holiday given they had other options. And if they'd wanted sympathy, why not tell people Moth was terminally ill and it was his dying wish to do the walk?

And fwiw, in my experience as a long distance walker and wild camper I've had so many more experiences that have connected me with humanity than not. It's one of the few things that one can do where meaningful interactions and conversations with strangers happen. Of course, many are basic "hellos" or "lovely day" but often I've heard people share their life stories or troubles and I've shared mine. On a trail like SWCP I would be amazed if there isn't a level of camaraderie to boot. So apart from the deep connection with nature (something I do actually buy from RW having experienced it myself) I don't get the distrust towards people, I get the opposite and a connection with humanity.

With all that said, I do find going "back to civilisation" a bit of a culture shock from life on the trail, especially after a long time. So I wonder if her feelings of social anxiety were more related to that, hence why she decides to put the tent up in the flat. And she conflated this with a distrust of people. Who knows?

I’m so sorry, Uricon - that sounds awful and pretty scary. Sepsis sounds very frightening - do you mind me asking how you caught it? I’m really glad you’re beginning to feel better and hope they get you back to full health very soon. Wishing you lots of strength and all my best wishes as you carry on recovering. Thanks as well for recommending the SA book - I’d like to give it a read!

It’s hard to know how much is my spidey senses and how much pure projection on my part! I agree with you here, I feel that she/they both as a couple have a sense of exceptionalism and entitlement; I’m thinking of a bit in Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes where Rachel describes stealing £20 from her best friend’s purse and thinking “she can afford it, she should have lent me it, it’s her fault that I’m having to steal it”. Anything to deflect blame and justify unjustifiable behaviour.

I wonder if that’s why all SalRay said about the Hemmings affair is “it was a pressured time for me. Mistakes were being made in the business”. Like Rachel, the thinking may be that “I’m under pressure. [buying property in France, powder-blue Agas and slate floor tiles??] You’re not making enough money to pay me more. I’m going to take what I think I’m due anyway and it’s your fault for not being successful enough to pay me more in the first place.”

• the French article previously posted on here said the brother Martyn moved to France in 2008 with his family. TW has another brother and this is likely the brother the TSP mentions staying with.

• I think I read somewhere that post was redirected to the (other) brother's house.

• the medical letters and undocumented prior consultations are a mystery.

Blimey @Uricon2 you've been busy! Hope your feeling better soon 💐.

I wonder why this 'other' brother has also not being going over to France? The pigeonnier has also not been restored.

I think your spidey senses are right. The sense of entitlement and exceptionalism
comes through in so many ways: RW describes her and Moth’s relationship as so much more ‘authentic’ than other people’s. They’re ’special.’ They can’t be expected to follow societal norms, they’re free spirits who won’t buy into the capitalist culture etc etc (though of course were perfectly happy to buy the Welsh farmhouse and set up a holiday let business when that suited them!)

also interesting how the ‘small scale theft’ - pinching something to eat or using campsite facilities without paying - is almost something to revel in. ‘Look at us, we’re not real thieves, we’re outcasts on the margins of society’. The deep irony that (assuming the embezzlement is true) she had stolen tens of thousands of pounds.

I’m not sure I buy the ‘I’ve only ever lived on remote farms’ stuff, either. In my experience of rural areas, the sparse population tends to magnify relationships, if anything. Fewer people, sure, but you know far more about one another.

And she grew up a few miles from Burton on Trent, which is a sizeable market town. They bought their first house somewhere in the vicinity (I can’t remember whether she said in TWS that it was ‘on the edge of the village’ or on the ‘edge of the town’ ) so, while I don’t know how long they stayed there, they only moved to their Welsh house about 20 years before the events of TSP, so there was a fair bit of her life that wasn’t ‘remote’.

And during that time living in Wales, it wasn’t as if she was a hermit on the farm, either — she had at least two bookkeeping jobs in towns, and they presumably had a stream of holidaymakers in their barn conversion.

I think your last point is true, absolutely. Which begs the question — why not just say that?

All very good points.

if you really don’t want to be around people, you don’t set up a holiday let business right slap bang next to your own home. I suspect the reality is more ‘I’m actually really intolerant of other people, they aren’t quite as special/authentic as I am, but I’ll happily use them to get what I want.’

@gattocattivo

"They’re ’special.’ They can’t be expected to follow societal norms, they’re free spirits who won’t buy into the capitalist culture etc etc"

So anti-capitalist that they can't possibly live in council housing.

With the millions the WalkerWinns have, it looks like crime does pay in a literary way. One can almost admire their chutzpah standing in front of the press at film premieres, knowing what they've done. Or perhaps they don't consider they've done anything immoral as others have suggested.

I wonder if the entitlement/thieving also makes you cover it up with treating yourself more. In Padstow they have Rich Stein chips and ice creams after having just stolen several packs of fudge.

There is also an inauthentic feel to the description there: it is heaving with tourists (like them - to me!) who hate their backpacks. If so, I would guess the queue for Rick's chips would be 30mins to an hour .....

Well, or ‘I can’t quite get past worrying that my past will catch up with me’, so easier to be all ‘I Vant to be Alone…’ Which then does raise the question of how long they thought they’d get away with it.

I’m rereading Amy Liptrott’s The Outrun, having not much liked it when I first read it (certainly improves on a second encounter), and she’s entirely upfront about her awful behaviour before she returned to Orkney — she was an alcoholic who did a lot of stupid, unpleasant, dangerous things, hurt a lot of people, got fired a lot, was arrested etc. There’s no pretence that she was a victim in this. Even during the Orkney passages where she’s wild swimming and counting corncrakes and walking, she goes back to thinking of her alcoholic days and the damage she did, to herself and others.

I’m wondering whether the Walkers ever considered telling the truth about why they lost their home, and whether they’re now sorry they trapped themselves with a fake story. Similarly with Tim’s diagnosis. Whether TSP could still have been a success with more honesty about the circumstances of the loss of their home, that they had other options, and that T hadn’t in fact been handed a death sentence just before they started the SWCP.

This is interesting from Amy Liptrott on the experience of collaborating on the screenplay of a film of your memoir, watching an actress play you as you were ten years ago, the bits that really happened but were too cheesy to work on screen, the decision to leave out her RL brother etc.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/sep/22/amy-liptrot-outrun-life-as-alcoholic-on-big-screen

What put it into my head is that they filmed on AL’s family’s real farm, and in the real RSPB house she lived in on Papay, and Saoirse Ronan sits at the real table she wrote the book at — I had been struck by how much less nice TSP’s film farmhouse was compared to the much more charming and beautifully decorated one the Walkers actually lived in.

@FightingTemerairepoint about the past catching up with you is very true. I’ve said in an earlier post, surely even if only at a subconscious level, there must have been some feeling of discomfort and unease ….. seeing your book become a best seller, being invited to give interviews and talks, then seeing two world famous actors starring in a film of your book. I wonder if at any point this feeling progressed from subconscious to a clearer realisation that this was a house of cards which could come tumbling down if the truth were exposed?

I’m not saying that realisation would mean RW facing up to what she’s done, because as many of have said, I think her capacity to excuse her own actions is limitless! But I wonder if there was a point when it all became so big and she became less able to control things that she was actually fearful of people from the past speaking out.

Fear of exposure is a most appalling way to live. A psychiatrist i knew once told me that most suicides are not caused by depression, they are caused by exposure or believing exposure to be imminent. I think fear of exposure must be worse than actual exposure. I do sincerely hope that RW feels some sort of release from the prison of fear now that the truth is out.

I wonder how much of the truth is out. In SW's rebuttal statement there was no explicit admission of having embezzled £64K or having made up the 2013 CBD diagnoses which form such a central part of the TSP narrative.

We are not uni dimensional beings.. there are many different ways in which we see ourselves and many ways we are seen by others... we change due to our actions, our experiences and our interactions with others.... and the prism through which we are viewed.

There are far greater villains in the world than Sally Walker, who have defrauded far greater sums of money and told far more damaging lies.

We are not owed her head on a stick.

I don’t think anyone’s suggested we are owed it? It’s simply an interesting situation of a (possibly needless) set of untruths and omissions created for a book that turned into a bestseller, and presumably ended up with the original untruths hardening into ‘how things really happened’.

The headlines have stopped, the story is already waning, but it will be interesting to see whether a substantially revised OWH ever appears, or an entirely new book setting out ‘the truth’, or a version of it, and whether it will be with her current publishers, who will need to weigh potential credibility damage against sales. As, of course, will RW. Lots of thinking to be done there. There’s also the possibility, obviously, of keeping schtum, and living quietly somewhere on money already earned.

I don't think anybody is owed her head on a stick but I think readers are owed the truth about whether or not Moth was diagnosed with terminal CBD in 2013 as described in TSP or whether this was a fiction that was subsequently retrofitted into the narrative for dramatic effect after a tentative diagnosis of mild CBS/CBD was made in June 2015..

More compelling for a story and continues the harmful effects of the "we lost everything due to trusting a friend" narrative to tie in as a sequel?

ETA - and let's face it, any author is surely motivated to make their book sell as many copies as possible to earn a crust. No one does it purely for sharing their story. So the more dramatic and compelling the better...it clearly worked in this case.

No one has said we are.

But if the true fact is that they became ‘homeless’ due to not being able to repay money borrowed from a relative to pay back money she’d stolen and avoid a criminal charge, then it’s absolutely fair enough that this is known.

Likewise, if it isn’t true that Moth was diagnosed with a terminal illness and given a few months to live in 2013, it’s fair enough that this is known too.

these are the two issues at the core of TSP, the whole raison d’être of the walk and the book.

RW has made absolutely vast sums of money from the public buying TSP, plus the subsequent books which came about because of the success of the first one, people have paid to see her appear at events etc … it’s in the public interest that the true facts aren’t hidden.

That's a rather melodramatic piece of writing.

TheBrandyPath · Today 08:44

I would like to make clear that I am actually horrified by the above interview, I shared. This is because it was hosted on The Grief Channel where people may be listening avidly at their most vulnerable time. I do not mean that she cannot share grief. I feel it would be very difficult - if you had listened and were helped by her - to find that it is she who causes deep mistrust ( I am very sorry for Mr Hemmings and family).

I hope you do not see my last post (above at 8.44) as being of a 'baying mob' mentality. However, she is not the victim.

I don't think anyone on these threads would disagree with your three points.

We are here to discuss TSP industry following The Observer exposé however, not the many villains in the wider world.

Absolutely no heads on sticks allowed on these threads. Fudge on sticks? Maybe. Simon Armitage's cardboard cut out head sellotaped to a stick for animation purposes if it can't be sellotaped back on to the body part? Definitely.