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.

She says in TSP that she’d given away the hens I think the year before when it had seemed they could not win in court, and that the sheep other than Smotyn the Elderly had died of old age or been sold.

She talks about having bought three lambs Smotyn and her ‘sisters’) when their daughter was little, and she did mention when she was on Private Passions taking back a ram they’d borrowed, so one assumes they lambed the original three ewes and perhaps had a small flock at some point, but unless they rented land, an acre isn’t going to support many sheep.

SW claiming she met TW at sixth form college when she was eighteen which would mean he would have been twenty at that time.

Well, it would have been unfortunate, as the lucky winners would have discovered that their ‘prize’ was heavily mortgaged!

Did we discount that the object next to the rucksack in Grant's orchard might be a metal box to store a drone? If not, then there is a strange drone connection with Raymoth that may or may not be relevant....

I think posters on previous threads said the boxes had camera equipment in them. What’s the drone connection?

Yes it is just her water bottle - not her son's drone, as I proposed!

There's a bit when they are walking down a steep hill towards the camera where (to my untrained eye) it looks as if his left leg is wobbly/uncomfortable. But it doesn't seem to slow him down. I do wonder what the camera people were thinking as they filmed. Of course it's possible that this a good day followed by many bad days.

Seconded.

@cricketandwhodunnits I do wonder what the camera people were thinking

When I first saw this ITV interview, a while back, it was like being expected to be in the crowd of The Emperor's New Clothes procession.

No one has been thinking have they - not for years? Lazy publishing and media. No presenters asking any searching questions or easily allowing deflected ones.

Lazy newspapers where Sally was the go-to for any article set in Devon/Cornwall.

Wasn't there a famous physicist who wondered why it was always the articles on physics that were wrong? I'm not sure what this is called .....

I think the point of the idea was to pay off the debts and the mortgage, esp if they were hoping to sell 250,000 copies.

Sounds like adding verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative (to quote another G&S) unless they were there at the meet and happy to stand up.

I don't have any issues with Moth. I do think that he probably has quite awful symptoms and challenges that are not visible. My issue has been with SW's massaging of the diagnosis ( along with the homelessness) to emotionally manipulate us. She has gone straight to worst case scenario with Moth's health and kept us there over 3, possibly 4 books.

I think it was concluded to be the water bottle. If it is the drone connection i think you mean then it is clear from her IG.

Hmmm. Given that she actually mentions the Australians I wonder how many of these people who contacted her, did so in order to say "hang about, wrong year, you never said that, I never said that..." The mixture of truth and other stuff is, as in the books, really head-scratchy. What's increasingly interesting and disturbing to me is that she can just switch into fictional "Raynor and Moth" world for an interview and speak as if all the characters in the books are real. (In an interview about a normal fictionalised-autobiography wouldn't you expect the author to say something more like "well the couple I called Dave and Julie in the book, of course that's not their real names, they kindly agreed I could write about them in my other books as well..."

In fairness, the people interviewing SW aren’t hard-hitting types, or akin to Paxman asking Michael Howard if he’d overruled Derek Lewis twelve times — it’s generally lifestyle sofa stuff where you can be pretty sure no one’s going to say ‘Well, he looks fine to me!’ or ‘Tell us in forensic financial detail how the bad investment meant you lost your house, because that makes zero sense in the book’.

They can’t possibly have hoped to sell anything like that. 3,000 used to be the normal initial print run for a debut author, and a small press might print far less!

How about just asking sensible questions?

The broadcast is asking everyone just to accept that a man with a terminal neurological condition has just walked 1,000 miles?

I agree that Moth has a condition that is giving him pain and difficulty, but he must be complicit in the subdifuge, also the consultant who made the diagnosis in 2015 knows that Salray puts that consultation as happening in 2013 in her book, why has the consultant not challenged the way their diagnosis has been presented timewise, we now know they are not ignorant of the fact.

I know! That's one of the absurdities of it, yet that's what they wrote in the smallholders' forum.

In a word, reputation. They will want no attention whatsoever. ETA, esp if they turn out to be the medical journal TSP reviewer.

I don't know how people can see that picture of him planking on the trig point, a manoeuvre that would challenge many fit healthy 20somethings and not think "Come on".

@SimoArmo I'm going to give you a laugh now, can't someone ask for an enquiry?

Came across this BBC interview today:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-cornwall-43546949

Shows how much Penguin pushed this book - I would imagine not many authors get interviewed 6 days after the release of their first book (TSP was released in hardback 22 March 2018, interview is showing the date of 28 March 2018).

Wasn't there a famous physicist who wondered why it was always the articles on physics that were wrong? I'm not sure what this is called .....

The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.
In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. ....... But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
— Michael Crichton, "Why Speculate?" (2002)
(Wikipedia)

I have realised this for myself - because of media on items like RayMoth. Both in articles and the book, if you live in Devon/Cornwall you see the mistakes.

Well, an awful lot of people thought he did. Just like an awful lot of people thought other fake or heavily embellished memoirs were true.

Most tv/radio interviewers doing a segment on a show won’t have read the book, anyway — they’ll have had questions (‘Tell us how you came to write TSP’ and ‘Have you always had a strong connection to nature?’) and a précis prepared by researchers.

And interviewers at, say, a literary festival or book event, who will have read it, are there to facilitate a gentle conversation around the book for an audience broadly consisting of fans, if it’s a cosy/feelgood affair like TSP.

Different if it was a tendentious political tome or a revisionist history of Holocaust denial or something.

(Though I have no real idea what kinds of literary events RW has appeared at. The tide has moved substantially away from an author reading bits and being interviewed, because it’s so inert. There’s much more of a trend towards two authors ‘in conversation’, which is way more lively, but it’s not clear who you’d put RW with.)