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.

She was relatively young. She graduated from Nottingham Uni in 2013 with an English degree. Moved up the ranks at Michael Joseph from editorial assistant to commissioning editor by June 2017...

Always did this back in the day. When they changed the lockers to 50p it was both blessing and curse because fewer people forgot them but obviously when you did find one you could actually buy something with it (I feel old now!!).

People haven’t used the word tramp for a long time, I don’t think. It’s been ‘homeless people’ for as long as I can remember.

That's interesting

500 Mile Walkies
The National Trust now owned about a third of the Cornish and Devon coast.
Slowly though, local feeling had become embittered. No-one liked the National Trust making the rules. The locals claimed that Cornwall was now in tune with the visitors 'needs rather than their own, and that they, the natives, knew how best to manage their own land.

TSP
We’d heard mutterings amongst the locals of a dislike for the National Trust who own over a third of the coastline of Devon and Cornwall, bought by Project Neptune to save the coastline from development. There were complaints that the Trust are too restrictive and don’t understand the need of local people to make a living.

Kudos to that child! 👋

Yes, I did think that the word 'tramp' was oddly used in that weird coin-grovelling incident -- the only English person I can imagine using the word 'tramp' like that is a friend's elderly, minor aristocrat MIL, who was one of the last debutantes in the late 1950s, and who has a purely notional relationship to the 21st century. And even she wouldn't prod a backpacker trying to catch a coin on a pavement with her foot!

And whatever about the logistics of throwing yourself on the ground wearing a heavy backpack to try to retrieve a pound coin before it rolls down a grating, it's even odder that Moth, actually in the act of stooping to pick up a two-pound coin, is pipped at the post by a small boy, who 'snatches it up in glee' saying 'I've caught money, I've caught money!' I don't think any small child would take a coin out from under the hand of a grown up who was obviously about to pick it up, or that any ordinary parent would let him.

And does Moth say 'That's mine, thanks' to the child? No, he tells him 'Well done, mate' and points him towards the icecream van.

Shades again of Saintly Moth shaking hands with the opposition barrister.

I hope not. A village near to us has just had the annual fête and everything was paid for in cash, totalling thousands of pounds in notes and coins including coppers.

Was quite commonly used in 70s to mid or even late 80s IME.

It sounds like this incident has been borrowed, additionally to ‘Tramp’ anecdote, and originally about a fluttering pound note…if anyone old enough to recall :)

I'm sorry I still haven't worked out how to quote!
I am another who had not read TSP before the Observer article came out, I was immediately interested, it made me wonder why no one had checked the facts. I saw the thread on mum's net started to follow and I ordered a second hand copy online.

I have read it as best I can, it is just wrong on so many levels, I have enjoyed the wonderful analysis by all the posters. I don't have any ambitions to write a book and I am not jealous of Raynor Winn, I don't like charlatans.

It upset me deeply to hear people suffering, saying that they had been negatively affected as a consequence of this book. I have suffered from this kind of thing, people suggesting ridiculous ideas for what they think will help with my DD conditions.

I am aware of the power of nature to make us all feel better, there has also been study to show the power of prayer can help people in recovery from heart surgery (half of patients told people were praying for them, they recovered quicker-they felt cared about) we know the mind is a powerful thing, but the claims she makes in regard to Moths health have not been medically substantiated.

I don't buy the homeless angle, even if the house had been lost through no fault of their own, I still don't buy it, such an insult to homeless people and takes away from their plight, I just listened to the Australian interview, what she said about being hungry was just nonsense, so all the starving of the world need is some hot water and the odd teabag?

If the book had started with her confessing to embezzlement, full of angst for losing the family home, how her husband was diagnosed with an illness that had no cure and she had put him in this situation. But even then the facts seem wrong because the diagnosis was quite likely two years later.

Many people here have tried to give the benefit of the doubt, maybe she was feeling that Moth would soon die, but that doesn't explain her continuing this theme for the next twelve years. I absolutely agree with whoever said that Raynor has become a professional at hard done by, she was the acceptable face of homelessness.

I don't think anyone uses the term tramp anymore, it's as believable as her encounter with the young man talking about the gentry, I thought she was going to have him tug his forelock !

It appears there be sharks in our midst once more so here is an old proverb, which, if memory serves me correctly, may or may not be old or be attributed to anyone in particular: "Opinions that do not value truth are most often based on ignorance."

Having greatly enjoyed Our Simons "Walking Home" I am about to start "Walking Away", the one about the SWCP where he repeatedly gets mistaken for Moth Winn.

I confess to tardiness in this as a friend lent me several volumes of a gripping detective series while in hospital and has recently delivered the rest, but I am determinedly putting those aside for now!

I don't think so. I can remember that the few homeless older men, usually drinkers with mental health problems and sometimes with a shopping trolley, were known as tramps in the city and town nearest to us, but that was definitely pre-2000. The women (even rarer) were known as bag ladies. Since then both men and women have been known as homeless people and are younger and in far greater number.

I can also remember tramp being used in the American TV shows of my youth to describe promiscuous women. Later on it was adopted by teens in the UK to describe their own peers.

Are you on desktop, phone or app @Frenchsocks ?

I'm on my phone, I'm really not very good at technology! I might be on an app, not sure 😟

@Frenchsocks

'I am another who had not read TSP before the Observer article came out, I was immediately interested,'

I got a £1 copy of TSP this afternoon in Cancer Research and will send to a friend. The lady behind the counter said that people had been asking if they've got the book - presumably the controversy has generated interest but people don't want to pay into the WalkerWinn's already considerable fortune.

I’m a late 1970s baby 🫣

@Frenchsocks, each post has a bunch of options underneath it that you can click -- quote, react, report, bookmark etc.

I'd like to do one more comparison between 500MW and TSP (then I'll go away until my indignant froth settles).

I have covered bus, ferry, tramp and National Trust. So this time - appearance:

500MW My nose in particular was suffering. Everywhere I went I left bits of it behind. My original one had shed itself in a couple of days. A new model had burst through red and throbbing, but now that too had dropped off ...

TSP As we walked on I didn’t see much of the view, most of my attention being taken by large pieces of skin peeling from my nose, and I passed more than a mile cross-eyed, trying to pull bits off.....My nose was glowing red, the new skin burnt before the old skin had shed.

I'm not sure what it looks like on a phone or app @Frenchsocks . Like Heroic says, can you see the line of options below the post you want to quote, with Quote to click on? The quote you want should then appear above the box you type your own post in.

Wow! If there’s an online copy of 500MW, I wonder if we could put the two books into Chat GPT or a similar programme and compare them? If a significant amount is similar across the two, I wonder if it’s worth letting CH know?

Re the Aussie interview. She tells him that they started out with around £40/week (TSP says £48 which in my head is around £50 a week) and that this very quickly drops to only £25/week (I can't find this in TSP).

Also the story about how much money was left in the account after the direct debit/standing order for the house insurance was taken out (Bude/cash point scene). Aussie interview 'all the money gone from the account' but they take the last £1.38 out (over the counter) which they use to buy six packets of noodles with the implication that this is their only nutrition for the next 5 days. They share one bag of noodles each day between the two of them. Along with copious cups of tea. (I can't even imagine how low in calories/protein /vitamins and minerals their diet would have been over those 5 days). However in TSP there is £11 left in the account after the money for the house insurance has been taken out. She took £10 out of the machine and got the other £1 over the counter.

Later in the Aussie interview when recounting the walk from LL she says they walked along the towpath between Glasgow and Edinburgh. However I'm pretty sure they cycled.

They definitely cycled it, @Divegirl65 -- because there's some kerfuffle about the delivery driver who picked the bikes up in Fort William dropping them off a day early at the Glasgow B and B, and then SW falls off her bike a couple of times on the towpath, and they land in Edinburgh late at night, just in time for her to remember their wedding anniversary.

Also from TSP:

"Treeless open headlands, ragged water-torn rock
formations and a coastline that runs from Hartland Point to a fading grey smudge
on the far horizon: a smuggler’s paradise. The heat kept rising. On cliff tops with no
shade, my cheeks were beginning to feel like leather and my third nose was emerging
from the peel."

It seems way too much of a coincidence that there are three very similar passages about quite random things in 500MW and TSP.

If anyone has Libby (the book-borrowing app), it looks like 500MW is available to borrow on there for further research?

I did have Libby once upon a time, but don’t any more - need to get my library card sorted so I can get access to it again!

@Fandango52 & others this ‘borrowing’ super common re: other authors too. They get away with it as use older books etc & few aware. Many of Downton Abbey ideas, detailed events etc not original IMO.