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.

Don't worry, you can still book her for your event - I wonder how much she costs?

Raynor Winn, Non-fiction bestseller author — Graham Maw Christie Agency

She also talks about getting published towards the end. Fascinating to hear the embellishments. She says she wrote and offered the article to Big Issue and they took it and published it 2 weeks later.

But we know from the piece by the editor this year that it was at least 2 months between her pitch in May and being published in July. The article also wasn't fully formed but helped along by the editor who stated: "I started to work out with Winn what an article could look like." https://www.bigissue.com/culture/film/the-salt-path-raynor-winn-gillian-anderson-jason-isaacs-interview/

This is just an example of how easily she embellishes even the smallest and unimportant of things.

Shall we have a whip round and invite Chloe H? (MWHAHAHA!)

(I know a) we all have better things to spend money on and b) she would probably rather face a few dozen hungry tigers)

I can’t thank Richenda Todd enough for her meticulous copy-editing, she was a pleasure to work with,

Earlier, when it was asked if SalRay acknowledged the artist, someone also shared the above. I thought - I wonder what a copy editor does?

I then came across this article, by a well-known writer, and compared to what the copy editor used to ask for - now, it seems not much.

From ‘The Salt Path’ to my fake columns, we can't recognise truth anymore

Yes, very irritating. The piece of writing which relates to this topic, presents Raynor as a woman that other middle aged women would want to give sympathy to on the basis that they have experienced the same prejudices based on their age and family related gaps in employment history. It is a common theme, sadly and has been reported about in news articles and I can personally relate to that as can others. Once my dcs were both at school I sort and found work very easily, in my thirties. In my late forties and having to find new work, I had more experience, but was only offered a pitiful amount of interviews from hundreds of job applications and the interviews themselves resulted in nothing. I blamed myself for being out of practice and I am an introvert so the interviews themselves were difficult for me anyway especially when a panel of three were interviewing me. I could understand and relate to Raynor’s attitude of dejection. I persevered however and sought to make myself improve at the things I thought were letting me down. I did have positive references from my previous employers, something which of course Sally doesn’t have, so of course Raynor must find other excuses for not being able to work.

That's another interesting piece. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's books were rigourously fact checked in 1995 and 2009. Obviously things have changed radically since then. The belief that there are different truths has become widespread.

Seems like a good shout - p229 of TSP. Could they have walked this section in 2016 (same trousers as Adelaide chapel)? Moth wearing different camo trousers at the FAC on 8 Aug 2015 when they meet the Parsons heading west.

Another grateful lurker here - I happened to be on holiday in Pwllheli when the Observer article came out, discovered these extraordinary, forensic, deeply absorbing threads (having never been on MN before) and have been following ever since. Just wanted to say two things in response to the RW book-recommending video in Waterstones. I own a copy of Who Said the Race is Over?, knew Anno very very slightly and found myself (to my surprise) very moved by what she said about his writing. It felt sincerely meant and chimed (as far as I remember) with my own reading of the poems many years ago. Secondly - there is a discrepancy (as we have maybe come to expect!) in her tale of how she discovered the book: in the FB video, she describes finding it at a railway station, while in her Insta post (linked by a pp) she says she found it in a dentist's waiting room. I have learnt an immeasurable amount from these threads - thank you.

Interesting. By the time the version with the film cover came out, they would have known of the CH investigation and that the "unflinchingly honest" claim was being scrutinised.

If you’d said you were in the Pwllheli area, you would have been set to work sleuthing around for people owed money by the Walkers, checking whether the bookshop owner had really refused to stock SW’s novel, etc.

I wish I had - How Not to Dal dy Dir is such an intriguing missing piece of the puzzle; I could have scoured the local charity shops for it... was only there for a few days though!

Hello all, I’m on holiday at the moment so I haven’t been checking these threads as often as usual, but just dropping in with a summer holiday update and tangential hiking anecdote.

I’m doing small sections of the Sentiero Azzurro in Italy, which is a beautiful hiking trail on the west coast. The hiking has been good so far, although despite being reasonably fit, I did underestimate it and found it very steep and tricky in places.

When I asked Google to compare it to a U.K. walking path, it suggested none other than the ol’ SWCP 🤣 This further deepens my doubt that the Winn/Walkers completed all of the path whilst carrying all their kit and in the condition that Moth is/was allegedly in!

Found the cover online

It's on this website. Apologies if someone has posted previously. https://americymru.net/ceri-shaw/group_discuss/57/how-not-to-dal-dy-dir-by-izzy-wyn-thomas-archived-material

All that 'she was a pure soul' stuff sounds very much like Sal's style of mawkish self-agranddising....there's something very teenagerish about it.

A list of Raynor Winn's favourite nature writing. She follows most of the authors on IG.

Raynor Winn's Favourite Nature Writing

Interestingly SW has an Irish travel writing namesake called Jasper Winn whom she appeared with at an Irish Litfest and is on her list of favourite travel writers - Jasper Winn. Jasper Winn's IG feed is fascinating.

(1) Video | Facebook

SW discusses Jasper Winn's latest book on Armchair Travel

So this proves that she does not even know in her own mind - what it would be like to walk the SWCP,

In the above, she corrects a questioner who says her walks are difficult.

In this interview she is doing the usual all 630 miles (which isn't even what she says in TSP) Mt Everest x 4, and saying it was much more difficult than she had thought, from 17 mins:

Scotland Outdoors - Long Distance Walking, Homelessness and the Power of Nature with Raynor Winn. - BBC Sounds

I suppose it depends on what SW wanted to/was prepared to do. I got a new job at 55 (I had been in continuous employment for the 15 years preceding this, when I worked in a school because I was a single parent with no help and living rurally, so I got a school job while the kids were small). I left the school job and promptly (with almost indecent haste actually) got a job in a supermarket. I think SW might have thought that retail work would be beneath her, but in my experience there are always plenty of openings as it's a job students tend to do for a year or so before they move on.

When they did a moonlight flit they each had a vehicle

Yes, having your own transport would open up far more opportunities for work in Devon/Cornwall.

Take her favourite Fat Apples Cafe. It is not open Monday/Tuesday and is up the hill from the cove - not right on the coast path. In the cove itself, in the last few years, the Five Pilchards Inn closed, the cafe next to it closed, the shop on the other side closed.

One of the legacies of second home ownership is that there are not enough people, who can afford to live in these places, that need to do a job serving food and drink.

The last time I was there, an enterprising local lady had opened a horse box takeaway as there was nothing else open.

I think this nails it.

Going back to the time in Wales, if TW couldn’t do the gardening any more for health reasons, he could at the very least have taken on responsibility for ferrying the kids to school and back while SW worked full time. We know they had vehicles and he had no problem driving; he was driving to University years later. And as stated before, their children weren’t even that little any more. By the time TW left the Head Gardener job, they would have been early secondary school.

I’d bet good money there would have been retail jobs, bar work, cleaning work available. Ditto for later on in the south west. They just didn’t want to do it.

Tim 100% told Bill Cole he had been told not to plan beyond Christmas. Bill Cole was brokenhearted. Although Sally is the face of the brand, Tim is an active part of the enterprise.

Agreed. Wouldn't have blamed her for taking cash in hand work given the circumstances. As was said earlier, she could have gone in with Moth to university and got a part time job there: university campuses tend to have work going in catering, cleaning, plus those options nearby in St Austell. Care work and cleaning are common routes for women who need work that fits around family, who don't have loads of references or qualifications, and who are in acute need of money. Yet RW was forever unlucky. Weird that she never went back to fleece tying for sheep shearers having been pushed into it by Polly done it once.