Thread 14: 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 13 Observer items currently available on their online 'The real Salt Path' page: The real Salt Path | The Observer

3 more from The Observer:

‘Hope is extinguished’: CBD patients respond to Salt Path...

The real Salt Path | The Observer (The Slow Newscast)

‘We thought: it can’t be the Salt Path couple – they’d ha...

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?

Thread 13: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5386458-thread-13-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 16 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 thirteen 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.

Are we all becoming Hyperglycaemic from all the fudge?
Have shares in Cadbury's gone up?
Can we remain cheerful in the face of such shameless glumwashing?
Will I need to fill up with much petrol this thread for the drive-by scoldings?
Will our Chloe H get exclusive interviews with the disgruntled peregrine, tortoise and Hollywood rabbits?
What has our Simon A got to say about this, preferably in verse?

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

Apparently the French property is worth about 17k now and would have been under 16k in 2013 so this wouldn't have prevented them from claiming benefits. Looking at the criteria for PIP, I don't think Moth would have been able to claim. So they could have been claiming JSA/ HB/ tax credit, providing they didn't have a certain amount of savings (unless hidden somewhere). The idea that they had no money in the bank, apart from the £48 coming in doesn't ring true. You just can't live on that much money, paying for accommodation, travel and food. Plus they bought their son a holiday to Rome!

I'm puzzled about the 2007/2008 period.

Moth gave up his gardening job in 2007. Why? What was he planning to do? Their house had a huge mortgage to be paid 🤷‍♀️

Then in 2008 (possibly only months later) Sally, who had been slowly but surely embezzling money from her employer and getting away with it, takes a bag of cash earmarked for the employees wages THAT WEEK. She must have known she'd get caught, how could she not? What was going on?

I think that the entire thing being a planned campaign of deception from the outset would be crediting them with both incredible luck, and Bond villain levels of calculation.

But I think it’s pretty plain that isn’t the case — as you say, they have a history of making batshit decisions, like raffling their house with every purchase of a self-published novel (even leaving aside that said house was heavily mortgaged AND in legal proceedings to be repossessed).

More calculating, media-savvy people with a grand plan of deception would have made sure their social media documented the walk as represented in TSP, for instance. It wouldn’t have been that hard to drive around with rucksacks, in the same few items of clothes, and take photos on bits of the path closest to road access, and make sure the dates the photos were posted worked. (See the teenage YouTuber who claimed to have hiked LEJoG solo, who found places to park his car that would either bring him close to parts of the actual path he could vlog from, or just anonymous remote backgrounds he could claim were anywhere.) They wouldn’t even have had to do it often, with the excuse of a crappy phone and limited recharging options.

They wouldn’t now be in the position of having to do spot Insta deletions of things that suggest the events depicted in TSP did not happen as claimed.

But we DO know they are serious discrepancies between the facts and the claims made by SW.
And I do think it is perfectly appropriate in general to try and make sense of how all known facts fit together (whether some specific speculations may or may not have crossed a line is a different discussion).

Ros Hemmings said he quit his job 'around 2004'. The 2007 claim is from an unvetted source.
Even if Ros is not completely sure about the year, I think if Tim had been her work colleague until the year before the embezzlement blew up, she would remember it.

Writing a ‘redemption via nature/walking’ memoir isn’t the obvious way to fame and fortune.

And yet in a way it is. These kind of memoirs are HUGE.

I can definitely imagine the Walkers discussing how to increase the likelihood of being published, and deciding to ditch novels and go for "Real Life".

They're intelligent enough to look at what's sold in that genre, and decide to use walking the SWCP, losing their home, and (after they'd researched the worst possible outcomes for CBS symptoms) a terminal illness diagnosis.

If that combination wasn't going to be a winner, nothing was.

Then Sally writes a work of fiction based on a walk that didn't happen, and a diagnosis that was never made.

She adds in superficial nature notes, bits about homelessness, a narrative of victimhood, and off she goes.

Absolutely she couldn't predict if the book would be picked up, and if it was would ever be successful. But she could make it as saleable as she possibly could and hope for the best.

I'm not condoning their behaviour - to lie about the embezzlement is a serious omission, but it's slightly odd that they are being picked up on changing datelines and small details, such as who they met when. This sort of smoothing out of material is really common in creative non fiction, as people want a story and life doesn't arrive in neatly packaged narrative form. I'm thinking about Educated, the famous and brilliant book by Tara Westover. Right towards the end of the book she admits she had several more brothers than she has described so far, and that she has made up their names to protect their identities and amalgamated the things that happened to them all into a couple of brothers' experiences. This made the book much more dramatic and easy to follow. I was quite thrown by this late admission and would have preferred it at the start.

And her hapless, dirt poor, inept, essential-oil making mother ended up being a world leader in essential oils production. I realised I had a few in my bathroom. She has a huge factory and employs lots of people. So she can't have been just brewing a bit of lavender at home and then made the sudden leap to massive factory owner. She must have been incrementally successful at some point. But that didn't play into the emotional journey of Westover escaping this dirtpoor junkyard and fighting her way to becoming a Cambridge Don. But she wasn't scrutinised for the discrepancies in her story because she partially admitted to them, late on in the book. And it is often understood that there's a creative element to Creative Non Fiction - memoir etc.

I'm interested in whether people would find the other discrepancies okay in Winn's story if the embezzlement were not at the heart of it.

The man in cafe in Mullion - acc to owners - might fit with this period although decades ago & poss irrelevant. Was the first ‘flit’ as late as we think?

They'd been in the house for about 13 by the. The cottage was listed for £ 40k when they bought it. I don't know if there was any profit made on the litter house in Staffordshire that they( supposedly) bought ,but even with a 100% mortgage, the repayments would have been about £300 per month back then. Unless....they had an endowment mortgage which were popular then.

I'm interested in whether people would find the other discrepancies okay in Winn's story if the embezzlement were not at the heart of it.

For me, without the illness and the homelessness in such unjust circumstances, it’s just a slightly dry book about a long walk- there’s nothing special about it if you take out their supposed circumstances. If it were a better piece of writing about the places on the route, it might stand up as a travelogue, but it doesn’t.

moreover, and for me more importantly, the book as it is is a special plea for sympathy. The embezzlement makes me feel very unsympathetic indeed, and when you add in the suspicions around Moth’s symptoms, diagnoses, and health I start to feel indignant (at best) and like the victim of a manipulative person. I don’t like that at all!

We know he doesn't have CBD, and we know he isn't terminally ill.

We know Sally Walker lied about his symptoms, and his illness.

We know they've lied about every other aspect of their lives as well.

Personally I don't think he has anything that half the population at his age from 2011 onwards (50+) doesn't have in one form or another.

At best, maybe he has a very minor disorder of some sort, but it's no more than mildly debilitating, and isn't progressing.

Moth is accepted onto the course (p216 TSP) and it says
We'd wait and see what happened about the packing shed before we made a firm decision. To give up the security of a roof and voluntarily step back into the abyss of homelessness seemed like an unnatural move.

Then on the next page (p217) Polly says she needs to find extra income and RW says if it'll help they'll leave ASAP:
We packed our things, taxed and insured the van, put enough money for a deposit and a month's rent into the bank and handed back the keys. We wouldn't be able to rent anywhere yet as we needed to wait for the student loan to come through in September. We had over two months with nowhere to go.

So they return to camping and then they're nearing the end
Moth would begin his degree in less than three weeks; we would have to find a room in a shared house somewhere, although the thought of a room in a house full of teenagers made me shrivel a little inside. I'd done that and thankfully they grew up. The only alternative was to hope for a long term pitch on a campsite that was keeping its toilet block open for the winter. (p266)

Then luckily they meet Anna in the cafe and Talland Bay and get talking to her (p267) She's mesmerised by Moth's stories. Then she asks them about what they're doing next and says:
'Look, I have a flat in Polruan. My tenants are moving out tomorrow but I haven't advertised it yet... If you're getting a loan or grant or whatever, I'm sure that'll be enough to cover the rent. It's only a small place; it's not much'
'Do you really mean that?'
'Yes', Anna laughed. 'I like you, so why not?' (p268)

It's a big question mark that I was thinking about yesterday. In TSP Moth has the uni idea in 2014 while at Polly's, and he is specifically looking at Cornwall and "a campus that's part of the University of Plymouth."

We know that campus ends up being in St Austell, which is close to Polruan (anyone with other knowledge from TWS please say so).

So we have a situation where they walk from Poole at the end of July 2014 towards Polruan having no idea where they will live. Quite serendipitously, they are offered a Polruan flat when they encounter Anna at Talland Bay.

Is this to be believed? Would it not be more likely they had the Polruan flat secured already before walking, or even before the idea of going to the nearby college? Who would plan to start a course and then go away camping before having any accomodation lined up, unless one were writing a book about two homeless people?

This is all without the added complication of the 2015 walk and the 2015 start date of TW's course (assuming no hypothesised access course in 2014).

ETA: unresoved questions are: did they meet Anna in 2014 or 2015 to start living in Polruan? And did the idea of uni happen before or after they started living there?

Is it important? Probably not much but the timeline here is a mess.

Apologies to Gouache from* *previous thread ( I don't seem to be able to quote from a previous thread to a new thread...is that a thing?). I misunderstood..I had thought you were somehow saying that a retrofitted diagnosis was acceptable amongst other timeline rejigging. I apologise! You are quite right..it does seem most likely scenario. :)

13 years lol.
The mortgage lenders might have contacted them to see if they had an endowment policy in place. This may or may not account for the reason the money was embezzled, they would still have the balance of the two homes to pay off.

Guys, it's been five weeks now...

Fair enough, but I still wonder why, and what he was doing. Their lives imploded when the embezzlement was discovered, but events leading up to that crisis would provide context. I know the point of these threads is the book itself, but I'm intrigued by the history that led them there. We may never know any of it, of course, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't leak out eventually.

I think that the entire thing being a planned campaign of deception from the outset would be crediting them with both incredible luck, and Bond villain levels of calculation.

There was a lot of planned deception regarding Tim's 'illness'. The 2015 letter lays out mild, indolent symptoms that might fit CBS. The Walkers change this to a terminal diagnosis of CBD and retrofit it to a week after their eviction.

I think they very much planned a suitably engaging memoir that was pretty much made up.

The Parsons' blog includes a meeting with people that appear very like Grant and friends, so it looks like they cribbed experiences from others on top of the rest of the deceit.

But we are never going to know as only Sally or Tim can tell us. And they won’t.

They should have just called it semi - autobiographical like The Pursuit of Love

From @DisappointedReader's OP:

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.

I think the whole deception stems from Sally trying to become a writer. Getting a book published or an agent is extremely difficult.
She eventually decided to combine her husbands misdiagnosis, an embezzlement and there love of walking into a redemptive narcissistic self promoting narrative.
The publishers quite clearly did no fact checking and realised this feel good narrative could be a lucrative goldmine.
Sally now had the chance to translate her failure in life into an extraordinary success story giving rise to a second career as a successful writer promoting the notion that walking, cures terminal neurological conditions. In a culture that promotes alternative health ideas not backed by any scientific research she became a brand ambassador for walking. She used the book to commodify her taste and lifestyle, giving carefully curated interviews. I feel sorry for her husband who clearly unwell is being used as a puppet on this giant money making venture.
just an opinion - don’t rip me to shreds.

I agree, from 2015 onwards very much planned. But hard to tell before this. For example I don't think TW's first visit to the GP in 2009 was the start of a master plan.

I feel sorry for her husband who clearly unwell is being used as a puppet on this giant money making venture.

I wouldn't feel sorry for him at all. He's not 'clearly unwell' in any meaningful way, and has been happy to live a life of comfort on the back of these books.

He told Bill Cole he hadn't long to live, which was nonsense.

Remember, their nephew describes them both as 'pathological liars'. They're both culpable. Both as awful as each other.

There was a mortgage of over £200 000 on the house at that stage. It's been estimated on previous threads that they may bought the place for cash with the proceeds of the Staffordshire house, then mortgaged it at some point to pay for the renovation of the barn, which they let to paying customers.