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.

I think it can be difficult if there are things you don't want to talk about.

I think I said this on a previous thread, but a novelist friend of mine had a 'cover story' for what inspired a novel of hers because, while she'd disguised the circumstances of the real event when she fictionalised it (and that was done with the full consent of the person involved, subject to those changes), saying in interviews what had prompted her to write it would have compromised that someone else's privacy.

So she lied about that one thing -- what had prompted her to write it.

I could tell in radio interviews, but I'm not sure someone who didn't know her well would have. It was a pretty polished performance. She certainly did a far better job than SW, but then she was denying a RL origin for someone else's sake rather than inventing one for her own, and was absolutely happy to talk in detail about the novel, its characters, its plot etc, because these were thoroughly transmogrified by her handling.

She also made the cover story rather dull, so no one focused on it, but passed on to the novel.

(And yes, I also noticed that when the Australian interviewer asked about the circumstances that had led to their homelessness, she backtracked to talking about the moment she met Tim as a teenager, which was absolutely not what she'd been asked. That bloody Mars bar dipped in tea has been made to do a lot of work. Though, weirdly, she seems to have forgotten that this was the moment she fell in love with him aged eighteen when he loses two teeth, rather horrifyingly, biting into a cold Mars bar on the Iceland walk in TWS, and doesn't mention her love at first sight moment.)

That advert brings back happy childhood memories of mercilessly mocking the song and changing the lyrics to rude ones
"It's full of Cadbury's cowpats, you don't know where it's been"

I was given pregabalin for Fibromyalgia, I completely lost 3 months. A lovely locum helped me come of it. It was like walking from a dark oppressive room into the light. It didn't even help the pain.

Was just thinking that we get no idea of the shape of her and TimMoth’s life, no colour to anything, no anecdotes beyond the mars bar in the cup of tea. Nothing about their kids, even as smalls. I’ve only been with my H a fraction of the length of her and moth’s relationship and yet I have loads of stories about things that have happened to us in that time. “Guarded” barely seems to cover it, she’s almost like a spy herself, terrified of letting the mask slip.

It’s perhaps interesting in light of this she’s defensive on Moth’s condition (Aussie May interview) - it was his lived experience. All the charity & disease consultation Jason Issacs did that was flagged seemed almost a sensitivity. Moth apparently dragged a leg all the way around. Had GA smelled a rat by now? The charities & specialists must surely have thought ‘hang on, this is really atypical’.

Also when asked how she got published so seemingly easily about her dream of a penguin on a spine, ‘my agent/PRH have told me to say not usually so easy’ - to paraphrase - What does this say if anything?

Also she is VERY clear about NEVER having written a word before & TSP etc all a happy accident. Someone that has had only one dream in life to write & be a Penguin published author but never written anything re: literary ambition even in rough…

There's absolutely something sexual connected to the Mars bars:

"Hobbling homelessly through Lynton, there was still something about the way he

ate a Mars bar that could lift my spirit in an instant. But months ago, a doctor had

given him a drug called Pregabalin to stop the nerve pain in his shoulder, and it

had changed everything. Just another loss. Still the closest a friend could be, but an

unapproachable physical gap was emerging.

‘Can’t beat a Mars bar.’

‘That’s a fact.’ The chocolate-tinged memories made me forget all about the dog."

Then a couple of paragraphs later:

"A group of wild goats, disguised by the scrub and rock, leapt across the path close

by, their long hair blown by the wind as they disappeared below, rugged, shifting, the

landscape made mobile in the flow of their movement.

I was transfixed.

‘Wow, did you see those goats? Huge horns.’

‘Not still thinking about that Mars bar, are you?"

She’s been currently reading for fun in that genre, a spy/prisoner on the run, WW2. Islands/landscapes involved - out of print etc.

Yes, I think that's a good point. First-time memoir writers often get the first draft 'wrong' by trying to cram in far too much, because they haven't figured out yet what the story arc will be, and how much the reader needs to know at any point, what is extraneous, what distracts from the main 'plot'.

For instance, we know that her mother's death featured in an earlier draft of TSP, and that she was probably advised to take it out by her agent or editor because it distracts from the main story of the walk and what happened on the path.

There will almost certainly be way more things like this, perfectly good stuff (stuff that even happened!) lost in the editing and rewriting process.

It would absolutely be natural to say in interviews, 'God, yes, I had an entire section about X, but it made that section too long' or 'This is what actually happened between place X and Place Y' or 'We had a terrifically weird experience at Z' or suchlike.

Yes, excellent point. At no point as far as I am aware has she ever made public the doubt over original diagnosis or that it was atypical. Has she ever used the term atypical in any of her books/ interviews?

@Featherbeds

(SW says in that ‘Corrnesy’ interview that it was sent out ‘a couple of months’ after her agent signed her, and I imagine that time would have been spent on rewrites.)

Does she really say 'a couple of months'?! At what minute in the podcast?

Because in this article she describes how she found an agent shortly after the first Big Issue article in July, and how it was ready to be sent to a publisher within 10 days!
And anyway, the time between July 2017 and publication in March 2018 is ridiculously short anyway, even without months spent on rewriting!

https://www.bigissue.com/culture/film/the-salt-path-raynor-winn-gillian-anderson-jason-isaacs-interview/

It's at about 18:00 minutes in.

Think in Aussie interview she says it’s CBD but I detected some worry/concern about Jason Issacs doing all the prep and consultation around this. I did pick up Moth had dragged his leg for entirety & this I know had flummoxed Jason as he found aspects tough.

There is also concern from agent/PRH she doesn’t make it all sound too quick & easy.

@Hyenana -- I have the transcript of that interview open, and it's around 18.20, but the chronology is not entirely clear.

SW says that after she sent off the usual three chapters plus synopsis to an agent, the agent got back within a few days asking to see the rest of the MS, and within a week wanted to represent her. Then she says 'Just a couple of months later, we had an offer from the publishers, and I've got a penguin on the spine of my book.'

That obviously doesn't account for how much of the intervening 'couple of months' was spent on edits. Could be that they spent 5 days on a light edit and started sending it out immediately, but I think that's hugely unlikely. An agent will generally do a fairly extensive edit, including structural stuff, with a debut author before sending it out, to give a book s/he believes in its best shot at being bought.

This is a really good point and I don't know quite what to make of it. I don't even really get much of a picture from the books or the interviews of the kind of person Tim is, or of how their relationship works, day to day; who makes what kinds of decisions, how their personalities complement each other, what he means in her life other than the very generic "everything". We don't hear (I don't think) stories about key turning points in their past [even, turning-points in her version of the narrative] - how they found the Welsh house and decided to take it, what it was like when they started the holiday let business, any big events at all in the lives of the children. To be fair, people are entitled to make decisions about what they say in public, and publishing one part of your life doesn't entitle your readers to know everything about your life. So maybe it's OK. But it's still rather odd. And entirely compatible of course with a backstory that's been deliberately concealed.

The doctor's appointment that led to the most recent letter on Sally's website is from February 25th so might have been in reaction to being contacted by CH then?
Are you sure about that date, and do you perhaps remember where you read or heard it?

The only extra story I know is where she is explaining the backstory of the new book.

She says how, from the very first time they met, they wanted to do the Coast to Coast walk together. She has to do it by herself, of course.

The letter was certainly typed up very quickly - we're in a different region, but DH got a letter from the consultant the other day, typed up and sent absolutely months after the appointment. 😁

Walking Hartland to Bude dragging one of your legs the whole way would be impossible. Even I, backpacking it in my late teens, super fit and strong - because I competed in a sport that needed high levels of aerobic fitness backed up by weight training - found this section hard going and I revised my plans for distances on that bit of the path.

I'm not sure if it's been posted before but Elli's film is really helpful to see how challenging this section is. ... and the following video etc. etc

SW's narrative of growing up in rural isolation is a real stretch to my mind. Yes she lived rurally on a farm - but in a big house with multigenerational extended family members. She attended a medium sized comprehensive school in the village of Barton under Needwood, which in the 1970s had a population of about 4,400 and was less than 4 miles from her home. Dunstall is also only 5 miles/a 15 minutes drive from the centre of Burton on Trent, which in the 1970s had a population of 50,000. And there is a lot of newspaper evidence showing her repeated enthusiastic appearances at all sorts of agricultural shows through her childhood, alongside various family members. But I suppose none of that fits the 'isolated child of nature' narrative!

Apologies if this has been discussed before but there used to be a news article about the South west coast path association “dropping” their association with her. The pages of their website which link to it from my search engine are now only “page not found”s. I wanted to know what role she had with them, if she was an ambassador or something. In my search I was sad to see that the “visit Cornwall” type websites are still promoting the truth of her book/story, nothing updated since the release of the film. I think they should phase out their articles on “The Salt Path” and replace them with stories and photos from Simon Armitage.

True!

And that letter could certainly be read as a consultant saying, diplomatically, 'Look, I didn't make the CBS diagnosis and while Mr Walker reports some symptoms, some of which are congruent with a previous diagnosis of CBS, others aren't, but his case is so atypical in its presentation nothing can be discounted, and keeping active and 'holistic management' is the best way forward, anyway. And he and his wife should definitely make it clear that, as they publicise the condition, that clinical outcomes will not always be as good as his, especially as further publicity will come from the film release.'

Apparently the singer songwriter Peter Skellern who composed "You're a Lady" in 1972 lived in West Street, Polruan a few doors down from Raymoth. He died in 2017.

Peter Skellern obituary | Pop and rock | The Guardian

The sensual Mars* bar is such a cringe metaphor, but isn't there a saying that food is the sex of middle age? 😁
(yes I'm old enough to be allowed to joke about this)

*Mars the hyper masculine roman god of war? 🤔

Would 20 year old Tim 😀dipping a Twirl in his tea have been less erotically compelling?