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

Fight, fight, fight!

Or, alternatively job share. I can do writing about walking, you can do writing books which sell...

Well, or it wasn’t far enough away from people who knew them?

@Catwith69lives — yes, I flagged up something similar under a previous username a thread or two ago. A different interview, but one in which she explicitly says they will be ‘setting off on a 1000 mile walk’ this spring.

Honestly, you’d think you’d be a bit cleverer about it by this point, wouldn’t you? If your USP is desperate, last-ditch walks undertaken to try to walk a seriously ill husband back into better health, even when (especially when?) he seems completely incapable of managing at all before you leave, then you can’t just announce you’re definitely off to do something that would be a real challenge for someone able and in perfect health.

Even walking the Cape Wrath trail seemed quite mad, given Moth couldn’t even manage two miles on roads with no load, but planning on walking the entire length of the country with someone you represent as so ill makes no sense, and completely contradicts the narrative of Landlines, which is that they only planned to walk Cape Wrath, and to keep going was an unplanned series of on the spot decisions made every time they finished a trail.

Another potential theory is maybe they wanted the walk to be fairly far away from their house in Wales?

Was it in the public domain, before their walk, that Simon was going to do his?

Maybe it's just easier to check the things you are supposed to have walked past if it's a long established route.

(Still very suspicious about the Hartland to Bude section)

Well, I didn't want to speculate, but....yeah

Yes, I think I saw a news piece from March Feb 2013 about his plans.

Simon Armitage to walk south-west coast path, paying his way with poetry:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/19/simon-armitage-south-west-coast-poetry

You could be onto something. Feb 2013 is also when the repossession court order came into effect.

Their attitude to Wales is a bit strange, I’ve always thought. On the one hand, they chose to settle there and stayed there, renovating a barn, running a smallholding, raising children (who must be Welsh-speaking?) for 20 years, and Raynor writes of their land with passionate love. On the other hand, they represent themselves as largely alone in the world while there, and the only time I recall Raynor referring to someone Welsh, it’s the offhand, tight-ponytailed woman at the council office who says they’re not a housing priority, and who has a ‘strong Welsh accent’ (!)

With the money accrued from the sales of TSP, they could easily have moved back to Wales, bought a house and land to recreate the life they appear to have loved, but they didn’t. Just like choosing not to walk the closer Welsh coastal path once they’re evicted, it makes rather more sense if they’re avoiding people who know about the midnight flit, the Hemmingses, money owed locally etc.

Has Raynor ever done book promotion events in Wales anywhere near their old neck of the woods, I wonder?

Well, my favourite Enid Blyton was The Five Find Outers and Dog series - I read all 15 of them. This seems more like The Fifty Find Outers and Cats .....

A major consideration for people in the south west is access to hospitals and specialists.
Why not settle near the specialists if you looking at a sharp decline then hospice care.
It's no secret that the south west is over stretched but doesn't have the population to justify niche specialists for CBD.

And Westward Ho! to Clovelly. From memory, she says Babbacombe Cliffs which flipped me over to the south coast. Then I though oh she means Peppercombe, but then she clocks that - must have been Abbotsham?!

This. And I wonder, if things turn sour in the south west for them, whether they'll get an amazingly kind offer to restore some other place in a different area and relocate there.

Which university was it Moth attended and what course? This may be in the later books, which I'm now intending to also read as Sceptical First Time Reader correspondent, when I get second hand copies.

It was a Plymouth University combined with Eden Project course.

In TWS, Moth is doing a horticulture course that seems to be a co-production between the University of Plymouth and the Eden Project, though that’s never actuslly said. Someone’s sleuthing on here produced a photo of Moth with fellow-first years, having worked on a garden.

@TheBrandyPath, are you a plump, self-confident, teenage master of disguise with a mysterious shed, hands-off parents, a small dog and a deep-rooted enmity with the village constable?

(The Mystery of the Missing Necklace was my favourite. I can’t reread them as an adult, though — the treatment of Ern, the comedy working-class boy, whose manners and speech are continually corrected by the middle-class Find-Outers, and who knows without any discussion that he has to have tea with the servants in the kitchen while the rest of them eat upstairs in the nursery, enrages me.)

I assume one of these.

https://www.edenproject.com/learn/degrees

University of Plymouth in partnership with Cornwall College and The Eden Project. It was Horticulture (Garden and Landscape Design).

https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/bsc-horticulture-garden-and-landscape-design

That sounds more sensible. The head has come off my Simon anyway.

On writing: take Simon's idea, add in 500 mile walkies, stick closely to the guide book, gradually add in @Spindlewood ‘elevated’ ‘communing with nature’ writing, add a large pinch of salt

@FightingTemeraire I remember feeling shocked the Five called the postman just by his surname - very rude - but was in thrall to Master Trotteville and his exceptional talents ...

I think we have to be careful to separate the artist from the art here. TSP (and offshoots) might not be entirely honest, but many people consider the writing to be beautiful and the story uplifting. We might question the morals of the person writing it and the reason behind it and the timelines et al, but the story remains what it has always been.

And if RayMoth really did believe that Moth was seriously ill because she suffers health anxiety and catastrophised wildly, she might have believed in her own tale of his health recovering. As one part of the Writing Correspondent team I feel duty bound to point out that many authors aren't quite squeaky clean in the 'honesty' stakes* and we have to make sure that we are decrying the right things.

*Obviously not including me and @Iwrotesomething who are as clean as a box of Persil.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat Can one separate the artist from the art in an unflinchingly honest work of non-fiction?

As the Board Games Correspondent, as well as the original SWCP, I see scope for spin offs: Cape Wrath trail, Coast to Coast, the Thames Path…. Players will move around the board, monopoly style, pitching their tent in various locations while trying to avoid campsite fees.

Instead of a banker, there’ll be a Book Keeper, in charge of doling out social security payments and doing accounts.

As a variant, players could vote the least trustworthy player as Book Keeper, who can then try to fiddle the books without being caught.

I think to a degree, yes. One can appreciate the art (ie the writing) without thinking too hard about the content. Otherwise 'Lolita' wouldn't have been such a huge hit for so many years, I presume.

We can condemn RayMoth for the lies, the prevarication, the twisting of the truth, the obfuscation, etc, but continue to admire the prose. After all, the 'unflinching honest' description was probably added by PRH, rather than the couple themselves.

Am not defending the Walkers in any way here, and would love to see a proper investigation into how this came to be published as 'unflinchingly honest' without anyone seemingly doing the most cursory checks, but to a casual reader who, let's face it, probably doesn't give a damn about any of the contents of our ten threads, it's still a 'nice book about walking'.

I'd agree but I'm yet to be convinced she knew/thought Moth was severely ill in 2013 to account for her level of catastrophising. And as we've seen with many other inconsistencies, it seems even less likely. More that she's very good at fitting "based on real life events" into fictional, emotional story arcs. Sure, it's not uncommon for writers to embellish and alter things for the sake of a story, but RW's stories depend on certain truths that are fundamental to the stories. If those truths are undermined, so are the stories IMO.

I think so. If someone asked you to write an ‘unflinchingly honest’ account of your day so far, you’d still select, omit, shape etc.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat — I don’t disagree. It’s possible Raynor is honestly representing her own panicked response to a diagnosis she catastrophised.

Where it gets more problematic for me is that she actively leans into the ‘imminent decline and a horrible death’ presented as total stark fact in two subsequent books and a huge amount of publicity, when it would have been perfectly possible, with minimal loss of face or credibility, to say ‘Further health consultations suggest Moth either has a different condition, or a very atypical form of what was originally diagnosed’, rather than to keep representing Moth as in terminal decline and needing to be saved once again by a walk she turns into a book.

And if Bill Cole’s account of Moth telling him he’d been told by his doctors not to make plans beyond Christmas is true, that’s pretty cynical manipulation.

Incidentally, I’ve just read Jenn Ashworth’s The Parallel Path, about walking the coast to coast path and getting letters at every overnight stop from her friend Clive, who is dying, and then discovering that her odd falls and dizziness en route weren’t sunstroke, but because she has a brain tumour. It’s very good on being around someone who is dying, on care, on how people choose to approach illness and death.