Thread 11: 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
Thread One www.mumsnet.com/talk/amibeingunreasonable/5368194-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?
Thread 2 Thread 2. To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet
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husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?
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Thread 8 www.mumsnet.com/talk/amibeingunreasonable/5375023-thread-8-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?
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Thread 10 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/amibeingunreasonable/5378984-thread-10-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

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 - 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 ten 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.

No saltiness. Keep to the path.

Does stolen fudge taste better?

You're v welcome! I hadn't realised that posting screenshots was quite that easy on here so you learn something new every day 😊

Given her frequent indications of contempt for ordinary workers in TSP, I wonder if that lies at the root of the embezzlement. She and TW were different and special, and deserved the money more, plus the dumb old worker or business owner was too stupid to notice it happening, would be the twisted justification of it. And - more unconsciously, maybe - the idea that they could do things that lived up to TW's ideals and aspirations more easily with money.

The 'dad was a tenant farmer' lie is the most TW-like lie from SW in that it's designed to big up her own status. Lots of her other lies are omissions or about making TW seem more important / dramatic.

I love a bit of armchair psychology and to be clear, this is all it is.

She grows up never feeling good enough.
Meets Moth- she falls hard for him.
Let’s say he has always embellished the truth or made things up. In their lives with her upbringing that could be quite a burden- imagine, you’re new to the area, you struggle socially, you have two small kids and although you did 2 years of a degree while working and raising dc1, you didn’t finish it. Then your husband starts telling people in the town this and that- you’re native to the area (so why don’t you speak Welsh?); that he has a degree in botany; that you have a certain lifestyle; how can you have friends when nothing your friends have heard is true? How can you be less than guarded when you don’t know what your husband has told people about you? What he’s offered them or agreed to buy from them? What he’s told your children about what they can have, where they can go?

Say things get worse and unless you find more money to make a lie true (for example that you had slate floors throughout your house, or you went skiing every winter (?) or you were buying a property in France) people will find out that one thing is a lie, then the whole lot unravels.

Never sure of your own status, your own self, you can’t allow people to see past the dreamnet that your husband has woven for them. You have to maintain it at all costs. Even if that means stealing to pay for it.

His get-up in those early photos is so pretentious that it would absolutely not surprise me to learn that he is like this. In the photo in the conservatory he’s in another waistcoat, tweed or wool, doubtless pretty expensive. He seems to me to be the source of the expensive tastes and she says several times in the books that he always wants to chat. From that post on Facebook she’s probably always heart sinking whenever he does in case he comes out with something else that’s impossible to achieve. Admitting your husband is a liar would be equally heartbreaking.

According to the account of the Jan 1973 funeral of Moth's grandad, he'd started the plastering business 26 years earlier ie c1947.

I remember Tim Severin! The Brendan Voyage is a classic and an early contribution to (inventor of?) what we’d now call experimental archaeology. Some shelf lives are pretty long.

I know someone who has lied about having a degree. They didn't even complete their first OU module, but then claimed to have a degree in that subject and offered to tutor people. Shocking, but not the only massive lie they've told. Pathological liar! They,their children are always the more ill than anyone else. They are always having alleged run ins with everyone they meet- people are always screaming at them, looking down on them, but when I've been with them these things haven't happened but have been massively embellished in the telling later on. And obviously loads of sympathy from those that surround them. I distanced myself years ago. I think some of it is not feeling good enough, and some it is being a total attention seeker.

And talking of attention seeking, I would like you all to know that I, an obviously amazing actor, once took part in a performance of Beowulf. I'm quite sure that makes me an expert on it. (OK, I was 10, in my primary school play and I played a villager who had to pretend to be cleaning or something when Grendel came, I think!) I may actually have to read it as I not sure of the storyline all these years later.

Main character syndrome maybe?

although you did 2 years of a degree while working and raising dc1, you didn’t finish it

I have doubts she did two years of a law degree, of all things, I think she's made it up, like she makes a lot of things up.

It probably tickled her to say she was doing a law degree after she'd been caught embezzling from her boss.

His get-up in those early photos is so pretentious

He seems to love himself even more than Sally does!

I think Rick went in 2004. So this was him returning two decades later.

The first visit was 2004

See I find the ‘saying Dad was a tenant farmer when he was really a herdsman’ thing puzzling because the narrative of TSP is that it’s a book voicing the underdog and the marginalised. Even besides the Walkers being homeless because they didn’t sell out and become high-flyers like evil Cooper, and losing the court case because they had to represent themselves because legal aid was cut, the only other people who escape the snarky narrative voice are other homeless people, low-level service workers defying unfair bosses, seasonal workers living in sheds and caravans, the ‘bad boy in the posh village’ who is about the join the army, talking about the upper classes and ‘Him up on the hill’ etc.

Why then make your background sound higher-ranking than it was in your next book? And why depict your landless parents as looking down on your boyfriend for not having land if they don’t have any either?

Perhaps she just lives a comfortable retirement in private off the proceeds of the books and the film, and releases no further books.

Rick first went to Hayes Farm in 2004

Knew someone who went to Cambridge but neglected to tell people he'd dropped out. His grown up kids thought he had a Cambridge degree. I only found out because I'm nosey(!) and asked a lot of questions about how he'd gone from there to where he was at the time I knew him. He said he never lied about it, wasn't his fault people just assumed it 🤷‍♀️

I think the main theme is that they are 'exceptional' there are many put-downs of 'humble' people. They are not tourists, they are close to nature .....

'Stuck on a sandbank. Misjudged the tide, d'in'e. He's going nowhere tonight'

Not the point, and don’t want to derail the thread, but I actually loathe the bits where SW writes the dialogue in a ‘local accent’. It makes everyone with any kind of a non-RP accent sound like a yokel 🙄 It makes my teeth itch.

‘Teaching at a uni!’ That doesn’t sound convincing to me… What would he have been teaching? 🤔

My guess at the logic would be 'I've actually done a head gardener job, so really I'm here just to formally get recognition of what I already know. Really I could / should be teaching this course..'

All speculative armchair psychology on my part of course.

What I have thought about - and don't have an answer to - is it is interesting that they are both fantasists. I have only come across one at a time, not a couple ...?

If they are both fantasists, I guess you could say like attracts like…?

OK, an update. In order to verify what I found earlier, I've spent a lot of tonight tediously scrolling through someone's Facebook page which took AGES because they've posted almost daily for the past few years and I needed to go back over a decade. (Plus we have a new kitten that kept trying to swipe my phone!).

Anyway, I got there and the info checks out. I needed to be sure it wasn't a typo in the original thing I found. I think it's pretty big, and it may already be on CH's radar given what she hinted at in the news event. So I'm going to email CH in the morning.

Sorry for the secrecy but with my journalist hat on, I think this info has potential for the basis of a story. To my mind, it certainly seems on a par, if not bigger, than the Bill Cole piece. What I will say is it seems to blow a big hole in the idea of the the walk in 2013 being continuous. Just to be clear, I'm not saying they didn't walk any of the SWCP. What I am saying is the continuous walk, as depicted in TSP (from setting off in Minehead to when Raymoth stop and head Polly's for winter) doesn't align with this new info. It's not a case of quick break either, its a huge gap that throws up a big question mark over when they walked. In doing so, it could undermine the idea of the walk as a journey of redemption narrative, which would not be "unflinchingly honest."

The book's story hangs on 3 crucial pillars: victims of homelessness, Moth's illness, and the walk. We've all seen the first two crumbling before us. I think the final one, without an extraordinary explanation, is about to go the same way.

Botanic themes in Beowulf?

Well done there! It sounds intriguing. Do let us know what you can when you can, but I'm sure we all understand the need for your caution at this stage on a public forum. A photo of the new kitten (cat tax) would certainly help with any impatience we may be feeling though.😺