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.

I was looking again at the photo of RW in the alleged Grant's orchard. I don't think there's box with camera equipment as previously suggested. It looks to me like RW's water bottle next to her bulky sleeping bag (which other photos show she attached to the outside of her rucksack).

What does strike me however is the length of her hair. It seems much longer here (below shoulder length) than in some of the later photos, even if it were tied back. Hard to tell with so few photos to compare. Maybe I'm wrong. But could potentially indicate why she deleted it.

The graffiti (if indeed it happened) could have been directed at the landlord?

Absolutely. If this was the truth she could have written the first leg as a response to losing the house after a dishonest act then two years later finished what they started by doing the second leg in response to RW losing her mum and Moth's mild CBS but nevertheless worrying diagnosis. Maybe it wouldn't have attracted an agent or been as successful but it would have been true.

Either/or. There's no way of knowing at the moment. The way its told does seem embellished though. @Catwith69lives has suggested the cast might be able to confirm. I also wonder if the "space theft hippy" might recall the year he met Raymoth. I'm not sure that was mentioned in CH's article on Sunday.

I’d take issue with some of your last point. Absolutely no one should ‘blame themselves’ for having enjoyed and believed TSP, of course not. You’re in good company, quite apart from anything else! SW’s agent and editor made a good call in taking the book on, for the excellent reason that they thought it was widely appealing and would sell. (Obviously every time an editor buys a book, they think this, and sometimes they’re not right. This time they were.)

I enjoyed it myself, having read it years ago, though I felt ‘Hmm’ enough about the court case at the time to google various combinations of ‘Raynor Winn’ and various courts, legal processes etc and was even more ‘Hmm’ when there was literally nothing to show they’d ever existed before the publication of TSP. (Then I promptly forgot about it.)

My points about some of the responses to the CH story being naive, I think, do stand, though. I think that more au fait readers are aware that a publisher is not guaranteeing the truth of a memoir, that embellishment and rearrangement of timelines are commonly done for dramatic effect, that there is no army of eager beavers behind the scenes checking table quiz questions and the sex of the cafe owner in a particular cove, that legal reads are primarily to avoid publishers being sued by either people misrepresented in the book, or for teaders taking it as legit medical advice, and not to ask ‘Did this really happen?’

I absolutely guarantee that a frank conversation about the writing and editorial process with other successful ‘nature redemption memoir’ authors like Amy Liptrott and Helen Macdonald would involve significant shifts in timeline, emphasis, location, the invention or deletion of characters, the removal or insertion of subplots. That’s not just SW being dishonest. That’s memoir.

Does that make embezzlement ok? Obviously not.

This made me laugh because his haircut was one of the things skepticshad great fun with in relation to a teenage YouTuber who claimed to have been the youngest person to walk solo from Land’s End to John O’Groats. He had an extremely fresh fade at the start of the supposed walk, and it was still looking equally newly-trimmed at the supposed end. And his blinding white trainers looked equally box-fresh the whole way.😀 (The hikers Reddit concluded he’d walked the very start, camped out one or two nights, and then drove the rest of the way, stopping when he could find somewhere with a plausibly remote-looking backdrop to record at.)

I said ages ago that it was her water bottle!

Isn’t there more than one silver ‘box’?

Sorry, missed that. Full kudos to you! I agree.

These threads go so fast it is hard to keep up! I googled the chapel to try and find something on one of these threads and almost a whole thread filled in two days!

Some 'skipping bits' thoughts:

RW suggests (p68 TSP)
'Shall we get the bus around the estuary, skip Barnstaple and Bideford?'
'We could, but it'll be days before we get more money, and besides Braunton Burrows looks really interesting: massive sand dunes made out of windblown shells'
RW agrees but with the condition that if he's too tired or in pain they'll get the bus. Then we have the 'given a lift by soldiers on an exercise' fantasy episode, when she says 'We can't go back, Moth's not well, we're going to Braunton to catch the bus' and a bit later we get
The bus took us to Barnstaple, and then we changed onto another for Westward Ho!. I felt as though I was cheating, and didn't understand why' (p70)

The Portland/Torbay bit: TW suggests at Dawlish Warren that they avoid the coming built up areas and get the train and then bus to Brixham so that they're able to camp in the open again. RW:
'Okay. Feels weird to miss another chunk, but maybe we'll come back one day and do this and Portland'
'Don't think it matters. It's not a pilgrimage. Is it?' (p248)

What interests me here is that it is a pilgrimage when they want it to be, or rather, when Moth wants it to be. He is fine with skipping bits he is uninterested in and RW goes along with that. When she wants to skip the Taw estuary bit earlier, and he wants to continue for the natural wonders of the Burrows, she agrees but then uses the soldiers' appearance to engineer them onto the bus, but also clearly feels guilty about it as it's not what Moth wants. Moth seemed fine and isn't described as being in pain at this point - there are plenty of other points where he throws himself down dramatically and says 'I can't go on' (more on this later). So both of them seem fine with skipping bits in practice - but it does bring out the dynamic where RW is always anxious to please TW and insecure if she thinks she's 'wrong' in relation to his rationale.

I have to agree. Some say rejigged timelines etc confirm a pattern of dishonesty but they really don't. As you say they almost certainly happen in every other memoir. She could have been a little less transparent with the glaringly obvious fabricated conversations and events that bordered on the ridiculous. However, for me the embezzlement as the underlying reason for homelessness plus trying to portray Moth as close to his demise are the main points. They were the emotional hooks and the sole reason I invested in the story.

Yes, that seemed most likely to me given the known hostility to second home owners in lots of places.

That’s certainly how I read it.

I agree absolutely that the embezzlement and portrayal of Moth as likely having just a few months to live are the 2 most important points.

However, as far as the walk goes, I think there’s a massive difference between rejigging the timelines a bit and actually presenting the walk as one continuous event during which they were homeless, stopping only for the winter in someone else’s property. I feel portraying it as ‘we walked the whole of the SWCP, only taking a break during the worst of the winter’ is a significant part of the story. The (likely) reality of the walking taking place in sections over a much greater period of time, some of which they weren’t camping at all but living in a flat, changes the story hugely.

While the health angle is clearly the most controversial, I actually hope that CH will concentrate on that because to me that is the biggest scandal in all this - that people (Raymoth and PRH) made millions by selling books centered around some completely impossible miracle cure for a disease that is 100% deadly, and the pain that has caused to CBD patients like John, their families and very likely people suffering from similar diseases.

The embezzlement for me is mostly important because it shows what Raymoth are morally capable of. And while I feel really sorry for Ros Hemmings, most of what was done to her happened before the book, not through it. And she has had the chance now to publicly tell her story, set the record straight, and I don't see what additional vital information there could be in that part of the story.

My hope is that CH does have evidence that Tim's diagnosis was wrong from the beginning, and I think she possibly hinted at something like that in the last video were she quotes the neurologist James Gratwicke as telling her
that doctors can be confused by a condition that is so rare they don't often come across it.

I also find it relevant that Dr. James Gratwicke is the first neurologist to actually come forward and openly express doubts about Tim's diagnosis, and I think they must know more than they say to risk that.

And I hope that the publisher will at least be held morally accountable for publishing this snake oil story with complete disregard for the actual sufferers of the disease - after the Belle Gibson scandal they really should have known better.

My biggest hope/dream is that this scandal somehow leads to some sort of regulation that would restrict the publication of unvetted miracle cure stories like TSP...

I don’t disagree. I’m just saying that quite considerable changes to ‘what really happened’ in the writing/editing process aren’t necessarily any indication of a fundamental dishonesty. The likelihood of parts of the walk being done years after the purported beginning, when their circumstances were completely different, does change the premise and vitiate the ‘hook’ of sudden homelessness and a terminal diagnosis in the same week.

Great work. I read the middle section you refer to a couple of days ago and noticed how they basically got a bus to avoid sleeping in shop doorways. Doesn't exactly fit with true homelessness where people often have no option.

In most cases yes, but I disagree for this book because the walk itself is driving the narrative and the claim is they did the whole path as some kind of redemptive journey. It falls apart when you mess about with the timeline of an actual physical journey. The true journey should be a continuous timeline, not a mishmash of different parts stitched together. Would be different if it was a mish mash of someone's general life events, but TSP is about walking a known path and the changes that happen along the way (ie Moth getting better, Raynor finding hope etc).

Oh I’m not minimising the health angle at all. For sufferers and their families, it’s completely awful that SW’s books may have given them false hope. My point is that it’s the more difficult issue to tackle because SW is careful not to present walking as a ‘miracle cure.’ She writes a lot about how it helps Moth physically and mentally - and that’s a subjective feeling to a large extent and therefore harder to disagree with. Likewise, her catastrophising about his health is a subjective thing… she could claim she felt devastated as soon as he presented with symptoms.

the embezzlement however is not a subjective thing. It’s clear cut and although it took place before the ‘walk’ and the book, it’s absolutely central to the events. If she hadn’t embezzled vast sums of money, they’d never have been in the position they were in.

Reading this again, I'm noticing how many of the effects of TW's condition are self reported. The ones the doctor writing the letter actually observes are almost all described as 'minor' or 'mild' with the most overt being 'There is certainly an abnormal posturing of the left hemi-body as he walks'. The 'numerous tests' done in 2011 including MRI and blood were all negative.

Obviously this is all speculation from a distance but there really is very little of substance here to go on for a diagnosis IMO. The language is very cautious. There's no mention of any previous diagnosis from 2013 - in fact it would be extremely odd to mention negative tests from 2011, if the patient had then been diagnosed with CBD in 2013. So this all suggests to me that there was no diagnosis in 2013, or certainly none known to the clinician writing this letter. Why, we might then ask, would RW share this letter in her rebuttal? Well, it seems likely to me that its main useful point for that purpose is that it mentions CBS (not CBD)so could be just about said to support this as Moth's diagnosis. And at that, my overriding thought is 'Is that all you've got?'

I'm really grateful to everyone working out the "alternative" timelines for the walk(s), it is fascinating. I'm still enfeebled (although infection markers have finally got below 200, go me) so haven't got much useful to add, other than that I think if it does turn out chunks of the walk described in TSP were done on an ad hoc basis years later, when they were no longer homeless, it does yet further change and cast doubt on the nature of the "unflinchingly honest" account (OK, we all know it isn't by now) Getting buses and the odd break to eg stay with family, not so much.

That photo is one of a series posted on 7 June. I think you're right, it is her water bottle.

Also the Dr supports the decision to undertake university studies, so they've obviously told the Dr that's the plan. But nothing about his opinion on their planning to walk some of the SWCP that we now know they did only weeks later. But perhaps they only decided to walk after this consultation.

Yes, it is. But she also deleted the same photo posted much earlier as a standalone post that had a caption saying it was "Grant's orchard"...I assume she hasn't realised the photo is also on that series of photos. Bit late now!