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.

Presumably the Irish Sea at Pwllheli, where she lived over 20 years, is salt-free.

In 1978, aged 22, my then boyfriend and I had a week in a caravan at Portreath, driving down from Surrey. It scarred me for life; one of the most frightening things I’ve ever experienced was sitting in the passenger seat going up Porlock Hill as we’d decided to take the M4 then drive along the coast. Next most frightening experience was trying to walk west up the “coast path” from Portreath bay. I got less than a quarter of the way up the steep path and froze, too scared to go up or down, and I wasn’t even carrying a rucksack. A kind middle-couple equipped for serious hiking caught us up and, seeing me on my knees, crying and holding the heather (I think) to stop me slipping down, shoved a hand each side under my armpits and shouted, “Come, we German, we help!” as they practically carried me to the top. And they smiled and patted my arm and strode off, while I cried some more, because I knew I couldn’t contemplate getting back down. I don’t remember where we headed, but we ended up finding a taxi to take us back to the caravan, which blew the holiday budget, and the boyfriend insisted on going home the same way so I had to endure going down Porlock Hill.

Years later my sister and I stayed with friends in Lynton and we drove about 50 miles out of our way because I was so desperate to avoid those terrifying hills. I’m in awe of people who walk the path with a laden rucksack.

That sounds hideous 😮 Did this boyfriend ever express a wish to be known by an insect-related nickname, by any chance?

I'm part way through that Radio 4 programme which is very interesting indeed. They both sound more Midlands than I expected.

He got called a lot of names on that trip, I assure you!

Thank you SimoArmo, for summing up exactly how I feel about her. I didn’t get far through TSP book because, as well as everything else mentioned, it was tarnishing my memories of walking parts of the path.

When I searched back in mid-July, I found that there had been at least one used paperback copy for sale between February and May this year, so it does look like some print copies exist.

I’m surprised she’d never tasted ‘lightly salted blackberries’ before. I grew up in a coastal area and had noticed this.

I think she just thought it was a suitably winsome thing to stay about the supposed period after the end of the second stint on the oath after they moved to Polruan, like being so unused to living under a roof that she had to pitch their tent in the bedroom.

(Which, as previous posters have pointed out more than once, is obvious nonsense because even if we were to accept the largely fictional timeline of TSP, they’d spent approximately four months under canvas, compared to about ten months in Polly’s.)

In reality, given that Polruan seems to have happened far later than claimed, and that it’s not clear that the second stint on the path really happened as more than a few scattered individual sections, proportionately they only seem to have spent a tiny proportion of the immediate Polruan years camping, so it’s even more ludicrous.

I also think that claiming she was essentially a recluse for their first year in Polruan (they’ve been living there about a year when a woman in a shop asks if she’s just moved there, as recounted in TWS) is a handy ruse for the fact that nobody would remember them as living there when she claims they started to.)

But ‘I am a simple soul, at home only on the path I loved, and that had returned me to hope’ is a suitably ‘Nelly, I am Heathcliff’ thing to say.

Moth's CBD/CBS diagnosis: The "top dog" diagnosed it as indolent CBS in June 2015, but not all experts appear to agree.

So we can add Diva to that long list of credentials. Sal’s the diva. Sally and Raynor… like Me, myself and Irene Moth, Jekyl and Hyde.

Not sure where or when this photo of Moth was taken but I came across it recently. Its his blue bandana outfit so possibly the end of the LL walk.

Yes. Knowing what we do now, it’s not only ludicrous to have painted that picture of displacement (the whole scenario of not being able to sleep in a bed snd needs to be in a tent on the bedroom floor) it also makes a mockery of people with genuine fears and paranoid delusions brought by on by trauma. I imagine this is what she wanted to convey, just as much as needing us to believe she’d been birthed from the soil by a magical being. There are all sorts of circumstances she’d brought upon them both (or they had brought upon them both) but hanging those circumstances onto falsehoods is the only way to garner sympathy. More examples here of manipulating the readers.

(On the subject of Salt, by the way… on a hot, still day we very often see a haze above the water and I think it must be salt. When it’s windy, you can see it rolling inland.You can taste salt on your lips and skin and feel it in your hair living by the sea.)

Also there's one review on the Waterstones website which is written by someone who's done loads of reviews so quite possibly a Waterstones employee? It is a positive review about the character development etc etc, but then I suppose if you were an employee you'd want to post positive things? And I'm sure it's not RayMoth because of all the other reviews

I live twenty miles from the coast and we often get a haar come across us from the coast - it's a sea fog which blows in and sticks around! Bloody annoying because it's usually when the weather is fine, hot and sunny literally everywhere else in the country, and we on the east coast are sitting under 12 degrees with our jumpers on.

I'd like to know whether SW put in all the overblown 'We Are Children Of Nature' stuff in her first draft of TSP, or whether an agent and/or editor asked for 'more coastal detail.' They might have done, in order to slot the book into that section of the genre, and SalRay went a bit overboard. It does seem to be the parts that people most like, strangely. Probably those whose exposure to the coast is during a week's holiday, rather than those who have to live with their jumpers within easy reach and an annoying inability to park on sunny days.

Yes,,I'm used to a haar as well. But it never seems salty like the pp says. Maybe I've simply got so used to it so it doesn't register. Lots of sea smells like seaweed etc. But can't say I've ever smelled or tasted salt in the air. I'd have thought salt doesn't stay in evaporating sea water when forming a vapour. Maybe it's a nuanced thing about how we perceive things differently.

I’m now imagining Mners wandering about licking their lips and muttering ‘Is my haar salty?’

One of the things I like about living near the river (well, as well as herons and otters) is that it’s tidal a good way upriver from here, so you can definitely smell saltwater and seaweed at certain phases of the tide, even in the city centre.

I understand the longing for a more 'back to nature' life but see much of it as over-romanticised. I came across this academic paper on the subject ....

insights into selected memoirs of contemporary British writers,
including Kathleen Jamie’s essay trilogy Findings, Sightlines, and Surfacing; Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun; and Carol Donaldson’s On the Marshes: A Journey into England’s Waterlands. Such non-fiction first person narratives, labeled as eco-memoirs, may provide an eco-centered approach to the natural world in the Anthropocene, and thus cherish hopes for a livable future for our planet.

KEYWORDS: new nature writing, eco-memoir, British nature writing, nature, hope

(PDF) New British Nature Writing, or an Emergent Hope

Someone upthread said they are Walter Mitty types. Absolutely! She seems so phoney that I am amazed her publisher couldn't/can't see through her.

Instead, it reads as if the editor has suggested:

Can you make more of your age? Can we stress your eco-warrior credentials? etc...

I think, as we become more and more an industrialised society, there is more of a romanticised mystique about the Great Outdoors. The majority's exposure to it is in carefully manicured selections - National Trust gardens, parks, maybe a drive across the moors or a potter along the coast. I've done my time in outdoor and agricultural jobs and there is an awful lot more mud and general unpicturesque misery than people want to think. In fact, I write a lot about the countryside in my novels and my agent is in constant despair over the fact that I make it realistic. She would love me to write cosy, pretty villages where everyone is your friend and there are cute cows and cuddly lambs in the fields. I write about high suicide rates among farmers, the impossibility of making a living, constant rain and the inter-familial hatred of one village for another.

Probably why I don't sell nearly as many books as SW... People want to believe that everything in the garden is lovely.

Thanks for the link, @TheBrandyPath.

There's a reason The Salt Path isn't included in that essay, and I think it's because it's simply not sophisticated enough as a piece of writing. (I've not read the Donaldson book, but have read quite a lot of Kathleen Jamie's essays, which are excellent, and The Outrun.)

I think TSP doesn't reflect on itself as nature writing, or think about what 'nature' might actually be, or how you might right about it without distorting it to be some kind of resource for you, or a reflection of your concerns, and how the human and non-human relate.

The author quotes someone else (can't find the quotation now) as saying

“[t]he real danger is that nature writing becomes a literature of consolation that distracts us from the truth of our fallen countryside, or—just as bad—that it becomes a space for us to talk to ourselves about ourselves, with nature relegated to the background as an attractive green wash”

I think this is pretty much what TSP does -- nature is an uninterrogated, consoling greenwash, an alternative to the glumwashing of SW's relationship with almost all the people she meets. She not only appropriates nature, she instrumentalises it. She never seems to ask herself what nature is, or how it relates to humans or human culture.

That essay references a Kathleen Jamie essay about her mother's death, in which KJ, grieving, acknowledges that this is a natural event, nature taking its course, but struggles to accept this, even as she also examines specimens in a pathology lab, as she waits for her mother to die. After the funeral she goes for a walk and says that nature had gone back to its usual place, fields and trees etc, because it's too difficult for most of us to recognise that we, cancer, bacteria, decaying etc are just as much 'nature' as birds or trees. That we are also animals subject to natural processes is a knowledge that's hard to keep uppermost in our minds.

That's not a question that even occurs to SW as she constructs nature as a form of 'cure' for what is going wrong in Moth's body (which is, of course, 'nature', too).

(ETA. Sorry, had to cut out a chunk at the start because of an accidental strike-through which wouldn't let me correct it. I just said that there are a couple of errors in the essay, understandably as the author seems to be Turkish and at a Turkish university and may not have much knowledge of the UK.)

Even the top dog seems doubtful in that letter. This paragraph:

Today's examination is very strongly suggestive of a cerebral disorder rather than myleopathy, radiculopathy or neuropathy. Of course the tempo and the normal imaging to date strongly implies indolent neurodegenerative pathology rather than any other type of condition. However, this is clearly not idiopathic Parkinson's disease and indeed none of the main neurodegenerative syndromes fit very well. I have explained to Mr Walker that his condition most closely resembles the corticobasal syndrome (MEDICAL MEDICAL 😄) but it is clear that he is affected very mildly, especially given the long history.

This to me says, in medical language

• This looks vaguely like a few things but isn't definitely one of them
• It doesn't really fit properly with any one medical condition
• It's closest to this thing but would be a much milder version of it

All of that seems reluctant to me to actually say 'this is the diagnosis'.

Oh, I don't know why I was imagining you as a fantasy/sci-fi author, @Vroomfondleswaistcoat?

I might read more of both if they contained more muddy, unidealised depictions of countryside, come to think of it.

Thank you so much for the above @Vroomfondleswaistcoat and @YarrowYarrow

Much appreciated insights - which I've been starved of, recently, with listening to SalRay

Of course reading someone's state of health from a photo is problematic. I will say though that while Moth isn't chunky here, neither does he have the gaunt frame I would expect of someone who's been doing a gruelling long distance walk on a diet of noodles, tea and the occasional stolen fudge bar.