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.

Sorry it’s been a busy week but I’m just going back to another thing that struck me as really odd. The Conversations with Cornesy Australian interview which was shared in the last thread.

RW says Jason Isaac’s was running up and down the stairs and jumping on and off kitchen worktops to try to copy Moth’s movements.

JI seems a reasonably fit man so surely trying to understand how Moth could barely get his coat on, struggled to walk etc would have been his focus. Very strange!

We know SW and TW had expensive tastes in household decor - that powder blue aga/raeburn and Welsh slate floors in the kitchen at Pen-y-Maes for example.

Welsh slate floors are default in most old houses in that area, though!

Ooh that's interesting. Can you say more about this? Has someone written about it?

They seem very enmeshed but the power dynamic is curious. I can't work it out.

Good point from the thread cats @Catwith69lives @DoubtfulCat that the nephew called them both pathological liars. They're in it together. No way TW could have been unaware of the embezzling.

Peter Mayle (A Year in Provence) was a francophile, highly successful in the world of advertising and the creator of the 'Man's Best Friend' books which hit a certain spot with the UK buying public in the mid 80s.

He was widely despised by his neighbours in Provence whom he depicted as ignorant country bumpkins but his books about the French dream sold like hot cakes in the UK.

I'm not 100% sure that Raymoth were intent on following in his footsteps in VDP or had read any of his books!

Late 90s into early 00’s was when the idea of “a new life in the sun” really took off, by about 2005/6 people were having to look further than France and Spain, there were endless tv show about family’s moving to restore a gîte

I think narc is quite an over used term at the moment. But they are very in it together. I can't believe for one minute this is on SW and TW is being dragged along. For example it's his family they're linked to locally and financially.
There's a lot of interesting reading on codependancy. It actually fits really well their situation. SW also puts the needs of her husband TW above those of her own children in the narrative of the book and likely irl. They are barely adults. Having him at all times on a pedestal is a clear sign
I'm the fraud correspondent not psychology but loads of reading on this.
Keeping someone close by making them support you is a covert narc tactic used to form codependancy. (All subconscious). I've been on MN too long and read too many threads!

What an awful way to live if you have an unequal partnership - in fear that your partner is too good for you/ may leave you for someone else. Jane Eyre would be appalled! Putting anyone on a pedestal ( including children) is not healthy.

Have PMd you.

OMG I had this exact thought while out on an evening stroll tonight!

I was thinking about two things: First, his symptoms in daily life and how he sleeps for 12 hours and needs woken by RW, meals pre-made for him by RW while she is away (there was a now deleted IG image of TW staring at days' worth of batch-cooked meals in containers), and basically how she worships him. Yet he's well enough to go on long, arduous walks, work on an orchard and attend events, all the while being the nicest guy on the planet.

The other thing was how he must have found it very difficult not to blame RW for ultimately losing their dream house because she stole £64,000. If he knew and was complicit then he'd still blame her for getting caught.

So it got me thinking, was he so angry at RW that he exaggerated symptoms to control/punish her without her realising? He first saw a Dr about his symptoms in 2009, which isn't long after the Hemmings fiasco and a huge debt that "Cooper" was likely trying to get paid back even before his company went under in 2009/10.

I acknowledge this is speculative and likely too farfetched. Merely thoughts on a stroll along a path...and yes I actually did walk.

I don’t disagree @SunlitUpland that many writers wouldn’t rate SW’s writing (I’m a writer too) and yet there’s so many reasons a pod like LWS would invite an author like her to speak - her experience of the publishing process, book promotion, writing a series… I could go on. Yet, she’s not been on LWS or any other podcasts like it.

Yes. Surely the (scant) evidence (the LinkedIn post from the nephew) suggests hostility, if anything?

Perhaps TimMoth wanted to persuade rich uncle that he couldn’t get a loan anywhere else, by saying SalRay had taken out credit cards in his name.

I think the financial troubles ran years deep.

A remortgage would have been cheaper than the 18% interest loan, if you could remortgage, having owned the house some 15 years you would have thought they could. Endowment mortgage from the 90s? Only paying interest off, maybe? investment into a property letting business (barn holiday let) that didn’t achieve its potential?

by 2012 the loan was at £150,000 had they actually been making repayments on the £90k in the previous years?

There was also the post from another family member (nephew's wife?), which said that when the Observer story broke it had been an interesting weekend in the Walker house hold and she was pleased that the story had come out.

She also "liked" a LinkedIn post (headed "Be sure your sin will find you out") which reported the Observer article and was critical of the dynamic duo.

I've put forward my thoughts on this many threads ago, suggesting Cooper was written as an amalgamation of half-uncle (who was only 6 years older and born in Burton area) and brother. If correct, we just don't know what went on for the brother to be represented as having betrayed Raymoth.

Well, it would damage her ‘little old me, just stumbled into writing’ persona, I suppose, if she contributed to podcasts or interview series where all the focus was not on the appealing, familiar ‘Raynor and Moth’ story, but on the craft of writing, the nuts and bolts of process etc.

But I think you’re probably right that she’s been offered but avoided such podcasts/interviews.

Though again, even leaving aside the issue of largescale dishonesty, it’s hard to imagine what the version of SW that we encounter in interviews, so deliberately bland and wholesome, so guarded, so on-script, would be able to find to say about the process of writing. She’s so thoroughly wedded to the idea that it was essentially an act of early dementia care, writing it to jog Tim’s memory, with no apparent thought beyond that, far less any ambition to engage a larger readership. Admitting she revised it, admitting she wrote and rewrote a pitch letter etc, or that she researched agents, goes completely against that image. And she claims it was only very lightly edited by PRH, too. Apparently it just flows out, naturally. Nothing to see here!

I was the person who discovered the nephew's post on LinkedIn. A public forum. And he later deleted that post, so obviously thought better of it for whatever reason.

As far as we're aware none of the rest of the Walker's wider family have involved themselves in these revelations in any way.

What are their families to do, completely disown them or go no contact, then do a media interview telling all? And if they don't appear to us to be taking some sort of public stance then it's okay to speculate what their "involvement" was?

Nothing about them so far makes them complicit "minor players" and open for a speculation free for all.

Just an update that, since reading TSP, I’ve now read TWS and also had a skim through Landlines. I wasn’t in the mood to persevere with Landlines, so I gave up.

I’ve never done that with a book before - hopefully the Great God of Literature won’t smite me!

Before giving up though, I flicked to the acknowledgements page and the last sentence, quite fittingly I thought, was RW thanking Moth for ‘having the courage to find his own truth’ 😂😂

She also "liked" a post calling the dynamic duo "a couple of devious grifters with form".

I don't see any reason to think that family members hahve been involved in any wrongdoing..

For general interest, here is the origin story of TSP, which RW is quoted telling for The Independent 23 Aug 2018 article (previously linked), which, as far as I can find was one of her earliest interviews.

She says, “It was about two years after we finished walking that I decided to write down what we had done, and I really did it for Moth. I presented him with about 40 pages for his birthday [this must have been his 56th, in July 2016], and then our kids wanted to read it, and everybody was like, this isn’t bad, you know.”

Winn’s childhood ambitions to write had melted away as “life got in the way”, but she decided to try to boil down the experiences into an article, which she placed with The Big Issue. It was a good fit for her; their experiences with people’s reaction to their homelessness fed into the ethos of The Big Issue, which benefits the homeless through its sales model.

The piece was published in the summer of 2017, and the reaction to it was so positive that it re-ignited Winn’s literary ambitions. She contacted an agent one Friday and was signed up with them a week later. Then she got a book deal… with, of course, an imprint of Penguin.

---

So in this version we go from 40 pages in July 2016, to an article in July 2017, to getting signed thereafter, and published in 2018.

There's no mention of when the actual book was written! Instead life got in the way?! Nevertheless, we know from RW's email to the Big Issue in May 2017 that she had in fact written the book titled Lightly Salted Blackberries by then. So it looks like she wrote it between July 2016 & May 2017. And over the years she's distorted the story into having written the entire book as a gift for Moth, because she can't help herself. Mistakes were made.

If written as gift for my DH the tone would be far more personal with more humour. If as early dementia, much clearer. Very little editing too.

Not at all far fetched.

One thought occurred to me about the stitching of the chronology in TSP

• we know that Raymoth were taken to Bristol on 17 Sept 2013 so probably finished up at Minack on 16th Sept 2013
• Did they recommence in 2014 or 2015? On Aug 8 when they met the Parsons at the FAC they were walking west towards LE which they would have reached around 20 Aug if they continued.
• Did they walk the whole way from Poole to LE in 2015? It's possible. They were at Weymouth between 23-30 July (first week of summer hols). But they couldn't have reached Helford where they met the Parsons on Aug 8 unless they walked 18 miles per day!

Interestingly, at Mousehole (which would have been on 18 Sept 2013 in TSP) were the chronology correct, SW reports that they withdrew £30 from the bank. Previously the weekly payments had been £48pw. Does this suggest that the weekly tax credits had fallen from £48 to £30 and this section of the walk took place in 2014? In various interviews SW has claimed that the weekly tax credit payments fell from $48 to between £25-30. The question is why.

The other thing was how he must have found it very difficult not to blame RW for ultimately losing their dream house because she stole £64,000. If he knew and was complicit then he'd still blame her for getting caught.

if he is the covert narcissist I think he is, he wouldn’t try not to blame her. Even if he had encouraged her, if she turned around and said “you told me to do it” or “we both did this” he would deny it. And it would only ever have been a verbal thing and just the two of them, so he’s denying reality to her and making her doubt herself- and after 30 years with him I expect this gaslighting is familiar to her: everything is her fault and he must be appeased at all times.
Life is good when your narcissist is happy and terrible when he isn’t, so you walk on eggshells all the time waiting to do something to upset him (or for someone else or a random event to upset him, but that’s also your fault).

Having the sun hat in his pack and watching her nose burn is typical of people like this. He would probably blame her for not knowing he had it. It’s also typical for the narcissist to make remembering everything your responsibility- even though they refuse help packing, it will be your fault if something important is forgotten. Like their medication, or enough water.