Thread 13: 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's original exposé: The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...

The 12 Observer reports currently available online: The real Salt Path | The Observer

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?^

Threads 2-11: Links all in the OP of Thread 12

Thread 12: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5384574-thread-12-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

New posters joining us in the genuine spirit of our civil discourse welcome. It would be helpful to read at least some of the Observer items above before posting. There are currently 12 interesting items on The Observer website and linked to above.

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 twelve 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 our usual reasonable and respectful fashion is very welcome.

Have the sales or thefts of fudge gone up recently?
Will Simon's head ever turn up?
Has the shed of doubt yet burst at the seams?
Will the old charabanc hold up as a tour bus for our hip new band The Drive-By Scolders?
And finally, how much salt can we possibly cram into a giant pinch?

Keep to the path. No saltiness. May the fudge be with you.

Ah,thank you. It makes more sense now.

There are photos of them on the Thames Path FB page showing them doing the walk with Raymoth in 2024 to raise money for PSPA

I'm pretty sure Dave & Julie do exist. Attached are some photos of them doing the Thames Path walk with Raymoth in 2024. There was also a hefty donation on Moth's Just Giving page from a "Dave and Julie from up north"

In her mind, she was covered by the NDA and her lies were difficult to prove; she's one of those 'I'm awfully clever' types with a solid ego.

She was also relying on the Walker clan "keeping mum".

Let's also not forget the Feb 2025 medical letter mentions TW now having a cardiac problem, and something which the Dr says is very unlikely to be related to CBD. Could this be the twist? A way to shift the narrative away from CBD perhaps, maybe even introducing the idea of misdiagnosis? Though this wouldn't really explain RW's comment that the walk had to happen in winter.

True. But she must have learned a lot from the experience of writing DDD and perhaps started another book straight afterwards which mutated into TSP.

Most authors have a lot of half started or completely written books in their bottom drawer which they will pull out and work on when they have time.

I mean I'm not holding this up as gospel, I'm just letting my brain freewheel and throwing out 'what if's as the thoughts seize me. But I can't see any reason why TSP might NOT have been written a lot earlier and revised.

I think this is possible too. Assuming TSP is similar to the first ever draft, if we look at the opening chapters, the story is presented as

• I decided to walk the SWCP under the stairs
• because we lost our home and business
• due to a financial dispute with a friend.

It could be such an idea was pitched to an agent but they said it lacked something.

The 2015 diagnosis then comes along and this is added to the story.

• two days later my partner of 32 years is diagnosed with a rare neurological disease that has no treatment or cure.
• we went on the walk anyway.

Pitch again, to the same agent perhaps, and they are now interested with this new emotional hook.

I can't pin it down, but there's something about the way TSP is written that feels as if the diagnosis is an add-on, and then has to be explained into a pre-existing written story of going for a long walk due to homelessness.

I've always found chpt 4 - Rogues and Vagabonds - a brief note on homelessness, very odd. It's basically a diatribe about homelessness in the UK with a lot of Gvt statistics from 2013. You don't get the same level of detail about CBD/CBS.

I’m currently on a long drive, listening to TWS. Some observations:

• It’s a good job I’m not doing the drinking game as I’d have been well over the limit in the first ten minutes of the drive (gorse, headlands, horizons, nature child etc)
• It’s quite an experience, listening to SW narrate. The dialogues (reflecting how she sees others) sound even worse when read by her: she brings a hectoring, scolding, irritated and disdainful tone of voice to every interaction, whether it’s Moth telling her how to rock climb, her parents telling her not to climb trees, cafe owners, other walkers, or the whole legion of uncaring, box-ticking NHS staff. (To be fair: one exception so far - a nurse who sounds human as she refers to SW as “duck”, which she likes).
• Another aspect of audiobooks is wrestling with SW’s speech impediment. I REALLY don’t want to be mean here but the l and r issues mean a lot of double-takes when trying to follow the narrative. “The glassy slope”, “geese on a rake”, “the rhino-covered floor”, “not wrong now” (said by a dr about SW’s Mum) etc. it’s just so hard to follow.
• Which makes me wonder if that’s another reason for her hating the name Sally. Would there have been bullying or teasing when she couldn’t say it, growing up? Granted, Raynor has “r”s in it but “l”s seem to be harder for her. It would possibly be another strand in understanding her anticipation of hostility from others and her preference for hiding.
• Chapter 2 has some amusing moments (in hindsight) as she and Timothy work out what lies they can tell the students on his course to explain their current situation - effectively building an origin story - they’re good at making up stories! If I had the physical book I’d quote it here but now can’t remember it word for word.

Enough - I must head back to the open road and the wide, far horizon. I feel the call of the wild, the magnetic pull of the Deep South. A lonely pigeon rises into the air just in front of me, as if to say “It’s time”. Hands on the wheel, I breathe in and commit to the unending road ahead. 😊

Absolutely. It's a very weird info dump that takes the reader out of the story. Could have been RW's or editor's idea to add that. I'm not even sure it's needed to tell the story. But what it suggests is the story is very much about homelessness. There's no info dump on CBD, or stats about the popularity and history of the SWCP, for example.

I vaguely remember in an earlier thread (or am I imagining this?) that there is mention of a second book in the pipeline from Gangani (coming soon after HNTDDD) not sure whether it was intended as a sequel to HNTDDD, and again, not sure if I have mis-remembered, but I have an impression it was to do with a walk / journey? I may be completely wrong about this though!

Given that Dal Dy Dyr is said to mean ‘hold onto your land’ (again, think this was from an earlier thread), and HNTDDD would roughly translate as ‘how not to hold on to your land (ie how to lose your land)’, maybe the first attempt at using literary endeavours to save their bacon was fiction (HNTDDD) loosely based on some of the people / themes in their lives (ie losing their land etc etc), and was going to be followed up with a second book, about a walk / journey, (maybe this was also going to be fiction, or maybe it was always planned as non-fiction?), which over time morphed into a second attempt to save their bacon, but switched over into the non-fiction genre (and maybe carried with it some of the fictionalised strands of earlier work / plans from Gangani)?

I am sure I saw mention of a second Gangani book in the pipeline (it was either from an archive of the gangani website, or one of the forums they were trying to market it on) - I wonder if this was the kernel that became TSP?

This is of course just idle speculation - If I am completely wrong about this - many apologies!

You are right - there was another book touted as a follow up, about a cross-country romp in the Highlands. Maybe that was what would become Landlines?

Three Mountains and a Ceilidh - a romp across Britain, was the next book due to be published

I wonder how much of that was written / planned out at the time, and whether it was intended as fiction, following the main character who has lost her land? Presumably when this book was mentioned on the Gangani website / or forum, they were still living at the Welsh house, so weren’t yet homeless, and had planned out a book (or even written, or part-written) about a walk / journey, possibly as a work of fiction following their now land-less main character?

So it sounds like it was probably not quite an epiphany while hiding under the stairs from the bailiffs, but maybe an existing plan / draft manuscript that was dusted down and re-visited in a new format?

Maybe the decision was made to switch it to SWCP for pragmatic reasons, once they had actually lost their home?

Again, all idle speculation!

@ShrinkWrappedInSeattle given how things work in the rest of her writing, I was surprised that when climbing in the Roaches, a wallaby didn't appear to watch them (although none have been seen for a while, there was a breeding population there for quite a while).

I think possible & guilt - all that but about her pure soul going black. Dead sheep too.

I am pretty convinced that the story about them hiding underneath the stairs and suddenly seeing 500 Mile Walkies in the packing case as the bailiffs hammered at the door, is complete BS

• the final court judgement confirming the house repossession occurred in Feb 2013
• the house was repossessed some months later in June/July 2013
• a farming neighbour who was out baling saw Raymoth leave the house in their SUV at 2am during the night and that the bailiffs arrived at 9am the next morning

Infodumping is a classic TW style thing, though. She does it in all three extant books -- about homelesslessness in TSP, in TWS about Icelandic volcanic geology, in LL about Scottish history. It's always a total snoozefest and has a cut-and-pasted from Google air to it.

Actually, if I were a Scot, I'd find parts of LL pretty offensive. For someone who has apparently been coming to Scotland since she was a teenager, she has some incredibly dopey, lazy ideas of the kind she always associates, sneeringly, with 'tourists':

Scotland is heavy with history, myth and legend. The glens and hillsides echo with the sound of its past: armies raised and fallen; battles fought, won and lost; hard lives carved among unforgiving mountains; crofters, clearances, heroes and monsters. I wonder how any country can exist in the present under the weight of so much past.

The petrol station carries as much Nessie memorabilia and trinkets as it does confectionary and petrol cans; it feels like a meeting place of the old and new country. I’ve found this in almost every store we’ve stopped at in the north and it makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. As if somehow I’ll be approached by a salesman for the old country every time I buy a loaf of bread. But if millions of visitors come here for the history and myth, then why not package that up for them? It leaves everyone satisfied with the outcome.

Discovering that Inverness has a lot of tech business and oil industry support stuff, she opines

I suspect there’s a lot more to today’s Scotland than tins of shortbread and Nessie keyrings.

That is unforgiveably lazy writing. Every bit as lazy and thoughtless as the 'visitors' (who are, we are clearly supposed to realise, not the Winns, who are all real and gritty) who buy Nessie keyrings and tartan-wrapped shortbread.

I found the events in TSP described at The Minack Theatre p172-174 fairly implausible:

• they arrive at The Minack in the evening not having looked at the guide book al day and thus not realising where they are
• they are given 2 tickets to Iolanthe by a complete stranger they meet in the car park whom they never see again, because he has seats further down in the theatre
• they sit next to the son of one of the gardeners who helped Rowena Cade build the Minack from 1929-34 who tells them that she never did any work but just pottered around leaving the gardener(s) to do all the grunt work
• they meet up with several of the actors after the play has finished including one who missed their lines because they were texting
• they get a lift in the actors' van which is taking them to a local pub before doors close

The head gardener was a chap called Billy Rawlings (1889-1966). He only had one son who died in 1997. A cousin also worked occasionally at the Minack but has also died. There are ample photos of Rowena Cade doing a lot of the construction work rather than idly pottering around and there are quite a few eye witnesses who are still living locally who remember her building the theatre from 1929-1932

The Minack Theatre Experience: It Started With Shakespeare | The Epoch Times

I also wondered about the choice of narrator for the audio books (as many people have commented on the speech impediment angle). Again, I am fiction, but I know NO authors who narrate their own books who aren't already trained actors/voice actors. There are a few non-fiction books narrated by their author, but, again, these are usually presenters or radio people who already know the importance of stressing certain words, using different voices for characters, etc.

So I wonder why PRH decided to let Sally/Raynor narrate her own books? Particularly as she's NOT a trained voice actor?

That is very much my theory too, as I wrote yesterday.

And right now I can see them going:

We have to pull the diagnosis forward to fit into the storyline - let's shorten the two years to two months!

Na, still too long a gap - how about two weeks?

Well, how about two DAYS for maximal emotional effect, or do you think that's too melodramatic?

No, let's go for it, you got to go high risk, high yield!

I first came across SW when she was doing a live zoom session with some sort of online book group I'd just joined and I was curious because I'd heard a lot of hype about TSP but hadn't read it yet. I struggled big time to understand her voice as well and remember quitting the session part way through although I was still curious about the book itself. Disappointingly the Audible version was read by SW so that was obviously a no go. Then I discovered that the one on Overdrive/Libby at the library was read by the actress Anne Reid and is much easier to listen to than SW's reading. I recommend trying that if you can get hold of it, and if you can't cope with SW's voice any longer.

ETA: I wonder how Anne Reid is feeling about all this,

The petrol station carries as much Nessie memorabilia and trinkets as it does confectionary and petrol cans; it feels like a meeting place of the old and new country.

I think this was Tyndrum which is the Green Welly Boot Store and she was BVU not to mention their fantastic whisky shop at the back of the place, staffed by incredibly knowledgeable and friendly people who offer very good advice. We’re always driving when we go here and so can’t taste the wares, but have never been disappointed by anything we’ve bought on their recommendation after hearing what we enjoy.

Anyway, just wanted to share that PSA for when the Mumsnet charabanc goes off to the Highlands field trip (bags me the back seat for that one!).

Right back at the very start of all this, possibly even in the dim and distant days of thread 1, I saw a comment on a FB post from someone who claimed to have been working for 'a publisher' when the first draft of TSP was submitted, and was in the slush pile.

No further useful details, however, such as dates. I didn’t make a note of it, sorry, and I doubt I could find it again.