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
Thread 3 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/amibeingunreasonable/5369425-thread-3-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?
Thread 4 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/amibeingunreasonable/5370609-thread-4-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?
Thread 5 Thread 5: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet
Thread 6 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/amibeingunreasonable/5372494-thread-6-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-
husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?
Thread 7 www.mumsnet.com/talk/amibeingunreasonable/5373425-thread-7-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?
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?
Thread 9 www.mumsnet.com/talk/amibeingunreasonable/5376712-thread-9-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?
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?

I saw the film before reading the book, and before all this came out and I got interested in the deception behind it. So I wasn't at that point aware of book/film discrepancies. But I don't remember Dave and Julie featuring at all. The film instead has an odd episode with a young woman and her abusive boyfriend where the couple invite her to walk with them, and after a point she goes back, but first they give her their last fiver 😇🙄 This just seems to have been made up for the film? Unless it's been borrowed from one of the later books.

On that note, my second hand copy of TWS arrived this morning 🙌 so I'm now embarking on a Sceptical First Time Reading of that.

I can remember seeing about 10 photos of Raymoth on the walk from her IG feed and various articles but I can't remember any of the south coast section of SWCP from Lands End to Poole.

However, the first 3 photos of SW's IG feed feature Chesil beach and camping in front of St Adelaide's chapel, Penlee Point on the Rame Peninsula just outside Plymouth. They are dated 25 and 26 Oct 2016. P258 of TSP describes them wild camping below St Adelaide's chapel at Penlee Point. Could this section of the walk therefore have happened in late 2016?

His alleged near photographic memory likely helped him with the job.

😂

You’ve likely nailed Ros I think, she’d give you side eye if you ‘forgot’ the collection plate, a steely but thoroughly good egg. I’d be doing a lot of local hedge hiding if Raymoth in the ‘mistakes were made’ aftermath.

I have been lurking since Thread 1 - hadn't read the book but saw a trailer for the film and was all ready to go and see it when the story broke.

I'm another family history buff and today I find myself in the Scotland's People Centre in Glasgow. This means I am able to see all Scottish records, including, of course, the Walker-Winn marriage record. Has anyone else seen this? I've taken a note of all of the details so can share info if required, though this will be later on when I get home.

Sorry if this has already been seen and I am, as ever, very late to the party.

The registry office in Portree was closed for renovation apparently and they got married in the DIY store next door apparently!

No, the young homeless woman with the thuggish boyfriend/possible pimp is not in any of the books. Dave and Julie don’t appear (as the film only deals with the first part of the walk, not the second leg where they meet them) either.

I have no issue with changes/ new scenes for a film adaptation, though. Things that work in a memoir often just don’t translate to screen at all. I think I said several threads ago, under a different username, that I was on a tv series set last year with a friend whose novel provided the basis for the screenplay, and it was very interesting to see what had to be changed from a novel with several first-person narrators and not much action into something that works onscreen, where someone has to be performing an action or speaking. In a screenplay, you have to be able to show everything. Or use a voiceover. I imagine one of the issues with turning TSP into a screenplay is that it is mostly just two people walking and camping. No real other characters, very little dialogue, lots of people who only appear for a single scene.

So the screen writer condenses all the scenes where people apparently recoil at the Walkers’ homelessness into one (the family at the tearoom) and makes Tim’s withdrawal from his drug much more dramatic, and condenses the various ‘visited by a heavily symbolic animal’ scenes into the peregrine etc.

I assume that getting the crew and equipment to many parts of the path was impossible, so they had to film where they could get to, explaining the oddities of location in some places.

I totally agree with rabbits were ridiculous, though. It was like an episode of Teletubbies.

Well I certainly don't remember seeing it, so welcome @CocteauTwin and thanks for this! What a team effort these threads are 😃

But it is meant to be 2014.

Someone certainly posted the date and confirmed it took place on Skye, some time back on a previous thread, but I can’t remember who.

It’s described in TWS. Moth ‘glowed in a bright cream suit he’d had made by a local tailor’ (I assume in Staffordshire rather than Skye), and Raynor in a white dress from a Lara Ashley sale, and as the register office itself was closed for renovations, they married in a room at the back of a builders’ merchant shop while a builder bought ‘half a pound of lost head nails’ on the other side of a sacking partition. Then they went climbing, went home and told the Winn parents about their marriage (doesn’t say whether his knew) and moved to their semi-renovated cottage which still doesn’t have plastered walls or a bed.

Exactly. SW's backpack is different in the photo from the one worn by SW between Minehead to Land's End. So either Raymoth went back to wild camp outside St Adelaide's chapel in 2016 or they never covered this stretch in 2014. Take your pick.

I posted the details that are on the Scotland's People website.

Just be careful @CocteauTwin about how many details you post on the threads. I personally wouldn't post the names of anyone else mentioned on the certificate, for instance.

We've mostly been quite careful on these threads about not involving or naming anyone in our discussions apart from Sally and Tim Walker themselves, and those whose names are already very publicly involved.

Like Simon Armitage.

Or Beowulf.

Or they went back in order to create a series of photos from the walk because they hadn't taken m/any previously.

We can have various theories about why there were no contemporaneous photos...

Have to share this, may be reviewing LL by the date:

Customer Review

J Whitgift
1.0 out of 5 stars Walter Mitty walks again ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 September 2022
Format: Audible Audiobooks
One has to be suspicious of a book about walking which contains no photos whatsoever, is made up of implausible coincidences, and where one of the protagonists has a serious and life-limiting illness which has little impact on the journey. (If you read the reviews of her first book you'll see how Moff's diagnosis and his actions correspond barely at all.)

This really is a Walter Mittyish book, more wishful thinking than fact. Something to keep book clubs in reading material than for real armchair travellers. Even the descriptions of the landscapes are poorly rendered leaving me to wonder whether they were actually traversed. (Edited to add. As there are no photos, I suspect the walks occurred only in the author's head.)
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So Moth ‘glowed in a bright cream suit he’d had made by a local tailor’ at their wedding.

Like a divine radiance? Raynor really seems to think Moth is the Second Coming

I imagine it was really a standard suit from Burtons if it was anything remotely special.

A hand made suit???? Yeah, right!

I would love to have a peek at On Winter Hill to see if she mentions the consultant's doubts re diagnosis. Somehow I think not 🤔

You'd think CH might have managed to get hold of a copy of On Winter Hill..there must have been some copies already in print for reviews etc

Well, having a crappy old phone that runs out of battery often, and that they don’t often have the opportunity to recharge I imagine would be the easy explanation for any of that.

I know their daughter is supposed to be giving them a new phone before they start the path, but, whether or not she dies, there are lots of references to it running out of charge, having no signal, getting wet and not working etc.

I mean, it’s an easy alibi for a lack of photos.

I wonder if the revelations were on the cusp of proof copies being sent out.

Publication end of October, that's almost four months from when the story broke.

I don't know when proof copies are generally sent out, I've got a few but can't remember when I got them in relation to publication dates. Corrections can be made before actual printing if anything glaring is noticed. And the books themselves are usually printed some time before the publication date.

I can believe it of him, he’d quite the dandy & takes great care & clothes ££.

I can imagine him saying it was a hand made suit...

I'd question the affordability of one at the time.

(Mind you, affordability didn't hold them back later in life!!)

Is it same story for later books?

No, or they’d have been knocking around, and someone would have written about the contents. Which means that PRH had enough advance notice before CH broke the story to not send out any advance copies or even uncorrected proofs for early buzz.

Has CH given a date for when she first contacted RW and PRH? Because it must have been early enough to halt all advance proofs/ early review copies etc. They would normally have been out there by the time the story appeared in The Observer.