Thread 15: 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 14 Observer items currently available on their online 'The real Salt Path' page: The real Salt Path | The Observer

4 more from The Observer:
‘Hope is extinguished’: CBD patients respond to Salt Path...

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

(Live/online event)

The Observer YouTube Channel: The Observer UK - YouTube

Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement: Raynor Winn

Thread One ^www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/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: 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: 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?

Thread 14: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5388981-thread-14-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 get the background from at least some of the Observer items above before posting. There are currently a number of 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. Remember, even Hollywood rabbits attract the odd flea. 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 fourteen 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.

#Pinchofsaltpath
#Fudge
#Cider
#OurChloe
#OurSimon
#Correspondents
#Salray
#Timmoth
#MistakesWereMade
#EmbellishedBollox
#JustBollox
#DriveByScolding
#Glumwashing
#ThereBeSharks
#Scones
#NakedHikers
#TurquoiseGString
#BudleighSalterton
#SallyForth
#YesItReallyIsThread15
#Rabbits

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

It's worse than that. The text says:

The doctor looked at me as if I was a child, then he carried on trying to explain a rare degenerative brain disease that would take the beautiful man I'd loved since I was a teenager and destroy his body and then his mind as he fell into confusion and dementia, and end with him unable to swallow and probably choking to death on his own saliva.(p15)

This cannot obviously be what the doctor said verbatim. It wouldn't have the 'beautiful man..' bit in if so, therefore is RW telling it from her perspective. Which means she's very likely here to be conflating what's said at the consultation with her own research afterwards that covers the worst possible outcomes, even though the doctor had also said 'yours seems to be very slow progressing' (also p15) That ramps up the drama and also makes it really hard to know what Moth was actually told about his prognosis. Very manipulative.

I think you're right in much of what you say...if we were dealing with people like ourselves.

But I think there's way too much evidence for the couple being serial fraudsters in in so many aspects of their lives to attribute more innocent explanations for their behaviours.

I have wondered whether Timmoth's original sore arm or any of his other alleged symptoms could have been caused by working as a plasterer.

About his alleged fall through a barn roof, are the Walkers habitual fallers through roofs as a family? Is it in the genes? Didn't Salray claim that their daughter fell through the roof of a chicken shop? I can't remember what we decided, suspected or discovered about that - can anybody else? Is falling through roofs just another story they tell but in different versions to suit?

@catwith69lives thanks for posting that comment from someone about schooldays cheating.

I must have missed this, can you tell me date/time please, so I can read, thanks

Yes, but 2 years is heavily implied.

‘Post-mortem? When do you think that will be?’ Moth’s hands spread wide over his thighs, holding as much of himself as he could between his broad fingers.

‘Well, I would normally say six to eight years from onset. But yours seems to be very slow progressing as it’s already been six years since you first presented with a problem.’

She's very good at this implied writing - like the farm tenancy, I think I have read something and then go back and realise that she hasn't actually written what I thought she had.

but SW does not explicity say at that point that he has two years to live.

She does however go on to say that in interviews.

I think there's a large number of things in SWs writing that start as implications and with repetition over years, become explicit statements.

It's like she's a generative AI bot. The more and more she trains herself on the dataset (ie the books) the more convinced and convincing she becomes.

My guess is that there never actually was a single print copy made of HNTDDD and that’s why it’s impossible to find. No- one ordered it, it wasn’t in bookshops, it wasn’t being sold online except on the extremely niche forums she was promoting it on as Izzy’s “friend”. I think a couple of people might have downloaded an e- book hence the reviews ( single digits).. Re the British Library legal deposits, e- books didn’t have to be submitted before 2013,when the rules were changed to include digital publications. Therefore if there was never a physical print of HNTDDD it would explain why it can’t be found in any records.

Anybody know when the SWCP was extended from around 500 miles to 630 miles? Certainly in the mid 1990s it still seems to have been around 500 miles.

A 4-Day Hike Around the Coast Of Cornwall - NYTimes.com

😂😂😂😂 Brilliant!!!!!

@Catwith69lives Anybody know when the SWCP was extended from around 500 miles to 630 miles?

No. It wasn't called that when I was a child. It has incorporated some of the former rail routes, etc.

Have you seen this way of calculating the difficulty between any two points?
<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20071024195604/www.swcp.org.uk/walk/reckoner.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Distance Reckoner

The reviews might not even be from real readers -they could be sock puppet identities of the family themselves. The more reviews you get then the higher profile Amazon gives a book (or so I am told) so they may have invented a few reviews to try to raise the book up the listings to get more people to see it. Selling a self published book as a first time author without investing in publicity is very very hard indeed.

I tracked down one reviewer who doesn't appear to have any family connection. FWIW, I think the very few reviews and blogs about it are genuine.

@Catwith69lives I have found an old book, from the '70s:

The South-west Peninsula Coast Path ...a walk of 500 miles

There was a tiny number of reviews saying that HNTDDD was the best thing since sliced bread, which could well be fakes. Then one person who repeatedly complained that the download link didn't work, which sounded real. And one review which said that plot points weren't very well developed but that it was not bad for a lottery ticket - at first I'd assumed that one was real, but wonder whether it was a less obvious fake.

One or two do appear to be them or linked to them.

The chicken shop roof was a blog piece on, I think, her publisher’s website during Covid? Now taken down.

I think that’s in part what the legal read will have required — that it is clear that these are SW’s subjective memories and interpretations of a medical consultation, that the consultant is never represented as making a firm diagnosis or forecasting a specific life expectancy, that she never makes explicit ‘miracle cure’ claims, and that she’s not advocating that CBD sufferers go on LD walks/
live on dangerous low-calorie diets to be cured etc.

"Almost like a schoolgirl copying and pasting a paragraph from Wikipedia into their essay."
This is what I think about a lot of it! A review from 2019:

The Salt Path, Raynor Winn – The Book Lovers' Sanctuary

Reading this passage again I have a few comments (as an ex - UK diver).

• if they had their fins (she calls them flippers) in their hands they would be walking normally and NOT as described (penguins).

• the function of the dry suit is to keep all water out. Obviously your head/hair will get wet. But as long as the seals on your wrists and neck are working your body will be dry. So the description of her standing dripping in her bikini is odd.

• you don't wear a wetsuit under your dry suit! You wear warm clothing. Even in the summer I used to wear a thick thermal under suit which is shapeless and NOT figure hugging. The thinner you are the more insulation you need when diving.

My term for these info-dumping sections has been RaySplaining - this schoolgirl analogy is spot on.

Which ones?

500 Mile Walkies by Mark Wallington was published in 1986.