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.

I tried looking up the cliff death the two old men in the coastguard hit (who ask for a pound to refill their water bottles, so are clearly wrong'uns) describe:

‘Crumbling rocks, see. Man came up here a few weeks ago, stepping back to take a selfie, over he goes. Next time we saw him it was down there on the beach.’

but googling St Adhelm's head and deaths/falls gets quite a few results (one in July 2015, woman on a guided walk) and it's generally described as dangerous, so not much of an anchor. People seem to fall there often.

There's nothing else at all to link their second stint on the path to RL events. The only real 'events' in the narrative are meeting getting back on the path, meeting Dave and Julie, having sex, encountering urban homelessness and sleeping at the woodland camp of homeless working people, and Anna offering them her Polruan flat.

I only realised when rereading TSP how little of the book the second 'half' of the walk takes up. On my Kindle it's about 50 pages, the 9 months at Polly's is only 15 pages, and the first part of the walk is 185 pages.

They may have actually been asked by PRH to write the whole path as better way to sell the book. So it could be an editorial decision to add in the rest. They may have then have either said - yeah we did it already or yes we'll now do bits of it (by car a few overnights weekends etc) so we can. It's why it's less well written. Perhaps the editor thought it would be better complete. This is also true if she wrote the book earlier then got it commissioned. So it had rewrites. Those isn't unusual. SW wrote this when TW was studying is my guess. Most people would have got a job in Tescos or something. Maybe she did let's face it. We don't know. She's not going to admit that though.

Not sure if this has been raised in these here threads, so apologies in advance if it has and I missed it/forgot it.

Anyway, here is what I noticed:

The Iceland trip was written to have happened in Sept 2019. Meanwhile, we know RW postponed a talk at Rye literary festival on 20th Sept 2019 due to an excuse of a broken toe, which suggests she was back in the country.

Yet 3 weeks later, we know from the second medical letter that Raymoth attended the clinic on 11 Oct 2019.

That day Tim describes his main symptom of "a pressure-like headache with throbbing and transitory imbalance." He also has tingling or numbness (parathesia) in his feet and pains up and down his legs.

So if this was just 3 weeks or so after the Iceland trip, does this not undermine the alleged health benefits of Tim walking long-distances to alleviate his CBS/D symptoms?

I haven't read TWS or have a copy so I don't know what's said about this walk in reference to TW's condition. So if anyone has a copy to look, it might offer some further insight.

TW would have 100% been involved in the embezzlement. He may have even been the driving force. Money came into family. Its a joint endeavour. Let's not blame just RW. They're clearly codependent.
Yes, very interesting. He must have known about the money.

Maybe the book came up too short after the edit of removing the mum's death etc, and she had to flesh it out with the extra walk.

The negativity in TSP was very clear to me. And not reality as travelling as a middle aged person on a budget. I know it appeals to a grumpy kind of English person who thinks they're very right-on but basically looks down on everyone else.

I've always thought that this element of TSP sits perfectly well with Mn AIBU -- an obsession with other people's misbehaving dogs or children, their entitledness, rudeness, joylessness (on holiday in 'prison-like holiday camps, yomping at speed along the path) etc etc.

Obviously the book was marketed and reviewed as nature-attuned and feelgood, but I think that for those who liked it, there must also have been an unspoken enjoyment of just how grumpy it is, and how other people (aside from a few homeless people, convenient yokels straight from central casting who say vaguely mystical things, Dave and Julie and Anna With the Flat) are invariably awful. It speaks to the total misanthrope.

I've always thought that this element of TSP sits perfectly well with Mn AIBU -- an obsession with other people's misbehaving dogs or children, their entitledness, rudeness, joylessness (on holiday in 'prison-like holiday camps, yomping at speed along the path) etc etc
Funny if SW was been a frequent poster here back in the day - besides AIBU, there's the creative writing board, property section, legal help etc... 😂

Hardly unflinchingly honest if that's how the publishers treat true stories.

I've just come in from the garden centre and saw a small flyer advertising someone's IG page -- someone walking the whole of the SWCP in one go to raise money for a hospice, starting in May this year and finishing a couple of weeks ago.

So I've been looking at the said IG page. Lovely pics! It's noticeable that the woman who was walking did some fairly heavy level training in the Peak District before setting out, but still found the tougher sections of the SWCP tough. But she doesn't seem to have some across any unpleasant people - and she's older than the Walkers, AKA those old people!

@RejoinedbecauseofTSPthreads

MothTim would definitely know about the money and, as you say, it could have been his idea. Between them, I wonder how much real work they've done as in having a job and paying tax and NI? Bearing in mind they're in their 60s. Someone said much earlier that they want nice things but aren't prepared to pay in, that's for the little people. Of course, RaySal wouldn't have a good reference after her bookkeeping 'mistakes'.

It's always been about greed despite them not being poor - they've had opportunities, a home they owned, the holiday let barn and have had family support at one time (even if not now.) Genuinely homeless people would love to have had the few thousand that the piece of French land would fetch to pay for a deposit on a flat or house.

Regarding getting a degree and going to college - MothTim could have started several courses and dropped out.

It's more that the second stint on the path simply isn't very engaging. Partly because it's much more urban, and there's far more skipping bits and far more dealing with the much less charming state of being homeless in a town, or camping in a car park or on a golfcourse, and less communing with peregrines or musing about salt air. No one is enjoyably dwelling on the bits where they try to sleep on a park bench, or on Colin and Dean fighting over beer in an underpass, in reviews.

But yes, I suppose it's possible that editorially it was felt that the book needed to deal with the entire path to sound complete, and her editor said 'Just get us through winter in Polly's and the second stint very fast and try to get back to idyllic nights on the rural coast staring at the stars asap.'

It would be a great place to get material, definitely!

SW could well be or have been a MNetter. She's the right age ... profile

Once my own DM got a copy and read it and enjoyed it I knew I was 100% right to hate it! DM and I are LC for a number of reasons but also because she's racist/homophobic/sexist. She loves looking down on tramps and hobos and those with any kind of joy and carefree attitudes that don't align with her rigid world view, and she like the old English holiday vibes of Cornwall. Cream tea, salt air, bracing walks, flasks of tea and outdoor clothing. Garden centre vibes. It's where a lot of these books have been sold. Entirely to women. I doubt many men have read it. It's a book aimed squarely at middle aged middle class or aspiring middle class women - Sorry if I'm showing my prejudices there. I'm one of those women myself even if I pretend I'm not. Love a cream tea!

Love a cream tea!

Yes, but do you enjoy a proper cream tea...or how they do it in Devon?

You take that back! I've got a headless cardboard Simon Armitage and I'm not afraid to use it!

😂😂 they do it the proper way, don’t they? I.e. cream (butter substitute) then jam?

<Merrily yomps down the SWCP after causing a minor diplomatic incident>

But isn't SW pleading for the humanity of the homeless (even if she's only 'homeless' in a fairly technical sense, in a way often indistinguishable from being on a cheap holiday)? I mean, it's in many ways like cosplaying homelessness, obviously, but the Message We're Meant to Get is clearly 'homelessness can happen to anyone, even trusting middle-aged people with adored elderly sheep, children at university and who travel, even when destitute, with a copy of Beowulf and a radio for the cricket scores'.

If your mother 'enjoys looking down on tramps and hobos', is it surprising she enjoyed it?

But there's no such thing as a 'true story', if by that you mean 'unmediated, exactly as it happened, not rearranged or reinvented'.

Someone up the thread (or on another thread? I'm losing track!) correctly pointed out that Cheryl Strayed's hugely best-selling memoir of walking the Pacific Crest Trail, Wild, was published nearly 20 years after she did the walk (she walked in 1995, it was published in 2012, and adapted as a film in 2014). Many of the events she talks about in it took place far longer ago than 1995, too.
I don't know that she took notes on the trail, either -- there's no reference to doing so in it that I can remember.

With the best will in the world, and even with the absolute intention to be as accurate as possible, there's going to be a lot of invention, rearrangement etc, there, especially as she's welding in a complex and often messy backstory into the 'now' of the walk.

I'm not suggesting it's akin to the tissue of untruths that is TSP (it's ages since I've read it, but from my memory, CS is entirely upfront about her stupid decisions on and off the walk), only that if you wrote things as they happened, it would be unreadable, and that editors will routinely recommend rearranging, cutting etc. to make a better book.

Not saying that at all. I know how narratives are written and structured, even ones based on "true stories". Perhaps I shouldn't have been so flippant with my use of true story. My point was if the publisher was willing to fabricate to such an extent as the pp suggested then it was highly disingenuous and misleading to pass it off as unflinchingly honest non-fiction.

ETA - I disagree that writing a story following events as they happened IRL can't be compelling.

In terms of comparing the truthfulness of the events of Wild with TSP, there’s no suggestion that CS didn’t hike the PCT when she said she did and no suggestion that the backstory that led her to doing the hike (her divorce and her mother’s death from cancer) is made-up, whereas the back-story to TSP is clearly embellished and the jury is out on whether RW and TW did the SWCP as a continuous walk or whether they even completed the whole thing.

Also, although it’s been a few years since I’ve read Wild, CS does not - as far as I know - routinely criticise or insult other people she meets on the PCT or portray them inaccurately for artistic purposes.

And for what it’s worth, I absolutely loved Wild when I read it and I think it’s much, much better written than TSP!

Again, we come back to the intial issue with TSP - that we are being told that it is 'unflinchingly truthful', when all evidence seems to point to the contrary being the case. So really a lot of the nitty gritty almost doesn't matter - the embezzlement, the (non) CBD, walking the whole path - each as an element wouldn't be important if we weren't being TOLD that it was all 'unflinchingly truthful'. Without those words SW could probably get away with saying that it was partly re-imagined and partly 'massaged' for narrative purposes.

But we are being told it's all true. Which does not appear to be the case, and THAT is what is bugging me.

In some limited cases, the names of people or detail of places or events have been changed to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such respects, the contents of this book are true.

This book does not read like a true account. Even if we had looked into it and found that the chronology was accurate, the details were as stated - it does not read like a book with important themes and a devastating backstory.

The incidents reported are like parodies. The people met are caricatures.

For me, the book has been tried and found wanting!

For me, the loss of their home through naivety (not criminality) plus the CBD are the two "givens" in the book. If they were true, the rest wouldn't matter so much, as they are integral to the story.

It's a bit like discovering that James Herriot wasn't a vet, and worked at Pets R Us - but in fact even worse, because there's nothing wrong with working in a shop, but there is with embezzlement.

So if this was just 3 weeks or so after the Iceland trip, does this not undermine the alleged health benefits of Tim walking long-distances to alleviate his CBS/D symptoms?
I haven't read TWS or have a copy so I don't know what's said about this walk in reference to TW's condition. So if anyone has a copy to look, it might offer some further insight.

Someone in an earlier thread suggested that the Iceland walk felt shoehorned into TWS, which in itself is a rather clunky, disjointed book with no real narrative arc. The first bit discusses RaySal’s feelings of discombobulation to be living in the small flat, not working or having much to do apart from flee to the coast path every so often. She kind of makes a friend called Gill when she goes to the WI (not her usual scene) to try flower arranging (which she isn’t very good at). Then Mothtim is getting stiffer and more forgetful, struggling to cope with the course reading. Interspersed with the present are flashbacks to her mum’s death, which actually read to me as authentic, and the musings on her childhood.

Then off they go to Iceland for a week or so’s walking with Northern Dave and Questioning Julie, and Tim can see again and ford icy fast-flowing rivers way ahead of Sal within moments of setting off.

I suppose they would argue that the short walk and the resumption of a sedentary lifestyle would account for the resumption of his symptoms? Our Instagram Correspondent also reported that this book says they walked in 2019 but that posts show it happening in 2017 (which would tie in with the advance for the book). But why insert that delay?

Thanks for the info. Yes, I also raised the Iceland date discrepancy way back when.

But here I'm more interested in the claims of arduous walking as a remedy for TW's symptoms, irrespective of whether the trip happened in 2017 or 2019, if that makes sense?

It's about how RW presents walking/physical activity in nature as a cure for Moth, yet only 3 weeks later he's gone to see the consultant with several concerning symptoms. This inconsistency would make such claims hard to demonstrate. Even if his returning symptoms could be explained away by him resuming sedentary life after 3 weeks - why omit that bit from the book?

Returning to the dates, it's curious to note that you mentioned Moth struggling with course notes at the time of Iceland because he would have finished his 3 year degree by summer 2018, and I thought TWS presented the Iceland trip as happening in 2019? Meaning another inconsistency that supports the trip happening in 2017 during his studies.

There's a lot of 'Cornwall' bingo in the book. Cream teas, pasties, rockpools, harbours, 2nd home owners, day trippers, crowds, overpriced ice creams. Another reason to doubt its unflinchingly honest account and its 'appeal to tourists' marketability.

In answer to OP, I have no set way of doing a cream tea... I love it any way. I've even been known to order a coffee with it. Outrageous.

Instant noodles is also a trope. They're also more of a younger person's cheap food. I don't remember in my student days them being such a big thing as 10 15 yrs later. Also for someone who raised dc not on huge money surely she'd be much better at creating meals on the cheap...
Anyway it doesn't matter as I think we all agree it's a work of fiction!

And as another OP said - there's no such thing as a true story. Even the News is curated to tell a view.

I don't actually have a problem with this.

I think most people have a problem with fraud though. And lying about medical issues (I know not evidenced)

She'd have probably got away with it if she'd not done the film promo interviews tbh.

The film I thought was quite enjoyable. Definitely watchable. The scenery carries it and great actors

Sorry I've probably derailed all your excellent sleuthing with my 15 threads worth of musings.

One other thing I've learnt from this thread is just how much info on a person is available via public channels. I never thought people would be able to find photos from newspapers 50 years ago. Seems you can. Good job I'm not doing anything anyone would wish to look me up for as was regularly in the local paper as a child 🙄