Thread 16: 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

More from The Observer:
‘Hope is extinguished’: CBD patients respond to Salt Path...
The real Salt Path | The Observer (The Slow Newscast)
I will link to two more Observer videos in the first post of this thread.

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 fifteen 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.

Yes, it really is Thread 16.

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

Tom Barrie Simmons - Cornwall Writers

Sending you a PM

Yes, he sounds like the self-appointed Chief of Polruan. (Maybe I’m being mean here, but he does make it sound rather as if the village took in this penniless couple out of the goodness of its collective heart and was congratulating itself…).

Plus I can never decide whether saying they’d ’later called her’ Rain and Wind’ is him being snide about discovering retrospectively they’d harboured the author of a bestseller or some kind of local in-joke. I mean, when exactly did they call her ‘Rain and Wind’? When SW was still living there? They were still in Polruan doing all those ‘What happened next?’ press pieces, but if they knew her as Sally, presumably they didn’t start addressing her as Raynor/Rain? Or after they’d left as a reference to the bad weather scenes in TSP?

@AzureStaffy, I think for me it’s odd, if that Christian blogger actually read TSP (I assume so, from the quotations), that s/he didn’t notice how profoundly unchristian it is in its attitude to others. Not just ‘unchristian’ but generally peevish and uncharitable. I’m not suggesting it should be, obviously, it just seems like a very perverse reading of it to see it as about the kindness of strangers.

More from Tom Barrie Simmons

Author Tom Barrie Simmons

I have been watching these threads and I have read all the articles. I wanted to join in to make a random observation that, as an ardent charity shopper and second-hand book buyer, I am seeing lots of unwanted Raynor Winn books on shelves now. I call it the Lance Armstrong effect as charity shops were inundated with copies of his biography when he was publicly disgraced.

Fascinating.

@ThePieceHall My little survey is showing the same. On an online site last week - 24 This week - 32 But they are trying to sell the signed, hardbacks for up to £50 Landlines seems to be discarded the most .....

Having the same experience - copies of all 3 books aren't going over a £1 here. The controversy has generated some interest but customers will get fed up in time and TSP and its spawn will go the way of Katie Price's books, sold as rags.

I enjoyed reading the first two (after the allegations came out), but couldn’t get into Landlines at all.

As a writer himself, I can imagine TBS put a bit of creative licence into his blog post. The "we" definitely strikes me as a "royal we". "We in the village but I never met them myself"

Well...as a Christian reading TSP before The Revelations I took it as practice in understanding, accepting and learning from people I didn't like (RW/SW). I'm not even joking.

Just checked tomorrow’s newspaper front pages - https://www.tomorrowspapers.co.uk/#google_vignette - and it doesn’t look like the Observer’s paper edition has any TSP updates.

I do see that (though seeing awful people as learning experiences seems more Buddhist to me). What I don’t see is someone seeing TSP as evidence of ‘the kindness of strangers’, more evidence of a particular strand of misanthropy (which I would find unsurprising if the Walkers had just had the double whammy of blamelessly losing everything and a terminal diagnosis, but which is much odder in the real circumstances). Wouldn’t you, if you were cooking up an effective feelgood book by doing lots of omitting and embellishing, put in more warm and fuzzy encounters with strangers?

The circumstances surrounding the end of the walk (when and how did Raymoth end up in Polruan) are interesting. Equally so are the events surrounding the start of the walk.

In TSP we are told that after walking out the door of Pen -y-Maes into the light/ fleeing in two cars at 2am before the bailiffs arrived at 9am the next day, they spent a couple of weeks in TW's brother's house while he was away on holiday with his family before making their way in their van to visit TW's friend Jan, who lived near Yeovil.

En route they stopped off in Glastonbury, saw an Old Etonian beggar with a skateboard and had a strangely discombobulating experience involving angels at "Heavenly End", which knackered TS's back and led to him recuperating for a fortnight on Jan's floor. Having left their van at Jan's, who gives them a lift to Taunton, they catch a bus to Minehead with the two raucous Americans who speak as though they are characters from Dallas (Where y'all heading there?} and the journey starts.

There are several problems with this account:

• "Jan" was probably TW's sister Janette who lived in Bristol, not Yeovil

• If you were going to drive from Stoke on Trent (where TW's brother lived) to Bristol, you wouldn't go via Glastonbury. The only way you could get Glastonbury into the narrative is invent Yeovil as the location where Jan lived.

• Therefore possibly none of the events described in Glastonbury actually happened unless they decided to go on a 2 week holiday in the west country before starting the walk. I spoke to a lady who runs a witchcraft shop in Glastonbury and she was convinced that 90% of the Angel Experience was pure fiction.

• if they didn't go to Glastonbury why did they spend 2 weeks at Jan's? Did they in fact drive down to Newquay to see their son whom they hadn't seen since Xmas and go body boarding with him (as described in the son's now deleted FB page). If so this would have involved a 350 mile round trip which would have consumed a fair amount of diesel

• at the end of the walk at Land's End/Porthcurno, the son drove from Newquay to pick Raymoth up and drive them to Bristol on 17th Sept, where presumably they picked up their van from Jan and drove to Polly's.

• SW also says at the start of chpt 5 that if they had started the walk 2 weeks earlier, as originally planned, they would have dodged the worst of the heat. This implies that they never planned to walk beyond LE and finish at the end of August 2013.

@WhoDaresWinns Thank you for setting out the main points, so clearly. I think I would have to conclude that the whole book can be summarised even more concisely:

Therefore possibly none of the events described actually happened unless they decided to go on a 2 week holiday in the west country.... I spoke to a lady and she was convinced that 90% .... was pure fiction.

I think it's pretty certain RW said that to make it seem like they lost everything when in fact they just stored it until they found a place to live.

I've mentioned before that the son posted in Feb 2015 about how they had "so much stuff" when he helped them move - so how on earth had they accumulated so many possessions in the space of 4 months after allegedly moving in to Anna's flat and surviving off Tim's student loan? Because the book is about as close to reality as Tim is to looking anything like Simon Armitage.

😀

Do you suppose SA now stares at his reflection in mirrors, wishing his Resting Poetic Bitch Face was that of a seductive vertical-haired Eco-Silver Fox?

Did they move to Polruan in Feb 2015 or elsewhere? There wasn't room to swing a cat in the flat in the apartment in Polruan compared to the farmhouse in Pen-y-Maes, so its difficult to fathom how they would have fitted allt heir stuff into the apartment, if that's where they moved.

SalRay's books shouldn't be looked at with a logical mind - there is so much unreality and contradiction in them that it leads to total confusion. It does for me anyway.

Yes, briefly treating TSP as purely a work of fiction, I was surprised that that blogger took the "human kindness changes everything" line from the various encounters in the book, rather than "normal respectable people can be really horrible without even thinking about it, because things are messed up"... he could have got a good sermon out of that one too! But the film seems to have a slightly different slant, and I haven't seen the film. For myself I meant that as I read I was trying not to pass judgement on RW for the weird/bad decisions she made. Which feels like wasted emotional energy now I know RW and her decisions are fictional (I wouldn't bother trying to learn to understand a fictional character I thought was unrealistic and unsympathetic).

@SimoArmo Because the book is about as close to reality as Tim is to looking anything like Simon Armitage.

I am not trained in literary criticism. However, I have moved on from looking critically at a work of Non-Fiction.

For me, it is only worth examining for its themes and the reception of this work in our contemporary culture - as a work of Fiction.

I think you're right - TSP has no value as a true and honest life story.

I think elsewhere.

They had to leave all books behind forever beyond Beowulf in library…To paraphrase ‘just walk out Dad & take the book you’re holding now (Beowulf)’

Also kids were allowed only one possession each to keep from their home, rest were thrown out,

Could someone remind me please....did Raymoth claim they completed the walk in one go with the only break being the time they spent at Polly's?