Thread 17: 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)
Links to more Observer videos can be found in an early post of this new thread and here: Observer YouTube Channel: The Observer UK - YouTube
Working timeline and references: can be found in early posts of this new Thread 17.
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?
Threads 13-14: Links in the OP of Thread 15
Thread 15:Thread 15: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet
Thread 16: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5395002-thread-16-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 are welcome. It would be helpful to get the background from at least some of the Observer items above before posting.
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 sixteen 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 17. I'm as in need of smelling salts as the next person.

We seek them here, we seek them there, mumsnetters seek them everywhere: just where are the elusive How not to Dal dy Dir and On Winter Hill?

#handwavium #appropriation

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

@BeguiledSilence could you explain a bit more about what you mean by this, please? “It is uncomfortable to discuss but maybe the 'cancer diagnosis' was not merely a condition lost in translation.”

Yes, of course.

The first thing, I find it difficult to review things that I have no knowledge of and when it is a serious illness - I prefer not to comment at all. Because of all the deceit that has led to other people, some with difficult health issues, being offered false hope - I think we have to enter that sensitive space.

I have personal experience of someone continuing to elaborate on a devastating health issue. This happens online but I know it isn't true.

I was specifically referring, in my earlier post, to the villagers in France who were told that Moth had cancer. They accept that as the reason he did not come to the village again. It is possible that the illness changed and transformed and was built on. Like the person I know.

The Salt Path couple’s house is crumbling like their reputation

Thank you. I think that’s quite likely; the question is, what were they trying to get out of in France?

I’m still a bit puzzled about what was said to BC (and the third party). Why would you say something that would be so easy to challenge down the line? What were they getting out of at that point?

It's possible.

Or it's also possible that it's just repeated hearsay with linguistic crossed wires thrown in. The neighbour's memory that he was told TW had 'incurable cancer' must be from quite a long time ago, as he hasn't even seen the Walker brother who owns the chateau and the adjoining property for ten years, since last time he saw him doing maintenance, and his memory is that he was told by that brother's wife about TW having cancer, so possibly a much earlier visit, as he doesn't mention here being there for the last maintenance visit. Who knows what her level of French was like?

Putting work and time into doing up the property? So came up with a unchallengeable reason?

Yes, but this is where the continuing brass neck is incredible. The person I know has nothing to gain whatsoever from their story, now that they are successful. It still continues to grow and is described to the unsuspecting - you can see people helping with it and lapping it up. Rather like Sally's gushing interviewers.

Agreed.

I suppose I've vaguely thought that if TW was saying something so dramatic (and with such a short timescale) to BC that it must have been because there was some significant disagreement with BC about the farm and how they were managing it, and TW had to pull something big out of the bag to stop BC in his tracks. Kind of 'the dog ate my homework' or 'I missed handing in my essay because my granny died', but scaled up for effect.

I agree that saying in autumn that he'd been told he shouldn't plan anything for after Christmas does seem quite mad unless TW was completely desperate to get out of a tight spot or change the subject. It's not exactly something that the person you're talking to is going to forget, especially when you are visibly alive and well after Christmas.

I suppose one obvious issue is that the Walkers had signed a tenancy agreement with BC a year before this declaration about not planning for after Christmas, and moved onto the farm the previous January, but left again for nearly four months (to supposedly walk the length of the country) from mid-May to mid-September. Was this negotiated in advance with BC? Did he wonder why his tenants had just vanished for months and call them to account shortly after they got home, hence Tim claiming to be at death's door?

Mind you, he said none of this to the press. It's just that the dates fit, just as the date they appear to have left the cider farm is shortly after BC read Landlines and discovered that at the time TW had told him he was now close to death, RW depicts them as being shown a completely 'normal' brain scan.

”A completely normal brain scan”
A miraculous brain scan, a brain scan with such unexpected results that in reality would have made headline news surely?

https://funeral-notices.co.uk/notice/walker/5246897

Not hard to see who TW might take after. Interesting to see that his father may have been in nearby Criccieth when the Walkers' home was repossessed.

I noticed that the book is being promoted still by MN.

Penguin's website has a section discussing "Penguin books that have helped us through hard times", and TSP is among them.

😑😖

Landlines promotion on Penguin website:

Raynor knows that her husband Moth's health is declining, getting worse by the day. She knows of only one cure. It worked once before. But will he - can he? - set out with her on another healing walk?

Being one with nature saved them in their darkest hour and their hope is that it can work its magic again.

As long as they are making money for their shareholders they just don't seem to care.

Well, no — because of medical confidentiality. I mean, I imagine he’d be of interest to medical researchers in neurology, if it were true. Though I imagine that if parts of the brain have apparently regenerated, the first thought would be to assume an original misdiagnosis?

Does anyone else find it paradoxical that the Walkers get cross and cite confidentiality in relation to TW's diagnosis, when they have published a book and sold millions of copies around the world about TW's (actual or alleged) medical condition?

The books are public knowledge, no confidentiality there. The last part of your post is correct, but not at all what the author would admit in her writing and hadn’t admitted since. What she is trying to claim is a miracle of biblical proportions and is presenting herself as a saint for being the one to cure him.

Well maybe it wasn’t the first time he had told such a lie, so it just tripped off his tongue…he does seem to “do a geographical” when things catch up with him.
It’s not such a worry if it buys you enough time to stop the farm owner questioning why you haven’t done any of the work you were hired for, and you’re leaving soon anyway.
Then just get the wife to pen a “miraculous recovery” brain scan in the next book. Sorted!

Maybe it was "don't plan anything for after Xmas" with a subtext of "because Sal and I are planning to flit in the new year"!

The books are entirely irrelevant in terms of medical confidentiality, though. A doctor cannot identify someone as being his patient, far less disclose the details of that patient’s treatment or prognosis, apart from in certain very specific circumstances when required in legal proceedings and/or in the interest of preventing harm. They would be struck off.

Did you happen to take screenshots? I wonder what the creative wellness retreats would have entailed.

But the timings don’t work for that.

TW apparently told Bill Cole he’d just been told by his doctor not to plan anything for after Christmas in a conversation shortly after they’d returned from the walk from Cape Wrath in autumn 2021. In Landlines, SW depicts the ‘miraculous improvement brain scan’ consultation as happening shortly after they’d returned from the walk from Cape Wrath.

The ‘miraculous recovery’ consult, as depicted in Landlines, is clearly the same one at which TW claimed to BC that he’d been told he was close to death. Both things can’t be true.

Which is why BC felt ‘gaslit’ when he read Landlines in 2022 and discovered that while TW had told him to his face in October 2021 he hadn’t long left to live, SW was claiming in her book account of the same period that the walk had magically reversed TW’s brain degeneration.

I do agree that the Walkers appear to have a habit, not unusual for confidence tricksters/people who owe money of sudden, unexplained disappearances.

The sudden vanishing from the cider farm, long before the end of their tenancy, apparently without warning, and leaving the keys under a flowerpot, is one of a pattern — suddenly relocating to Wales from Staffordshire with some flimsy story about a child getting out onto a road, SW disappearing after she’d been questioned by police and not attending the agreed meeting at the police station, the moonlight flit as observed by neighbours after losing the court case etc.

I just wonder why the sudden disappearance from the cider farm. Because BC, perhaps understandably, given that they weren’t on the farm for a full four months of their first year, wasn’t happy with their management? Because TW told him he was close to death and it was going to get messy when he didn’t die?

Again, why TW told him that is interesting, given that he was presumably well aware that SW was going to depict another marked improvement as a result of a walk in the book of this period, and he would have been aware he was going dangerously off-message…?

Yes, that’s true of course. I was comparing this situation to news articles I’ve read about Parkinson’s specifically because there have been some breakthroughs with certain drugs. Of course, I’m clutching at straws…I was just frustratedly thinking again about the “honest” label and non fiction category and that if that were all true, why wasn’t it being examined … such as her confiding in the reader as she does, letting them know that Moth was going to be the subject of some intense medical scrutiny.
I hate that she has conned vulnerable people and damaged their lives in a physical and mental way, as we have seen in the interviews.

Having known someone like this I think he'd have assumed that Bill liked him too much to publicly call him out, and if he did, there were no witnesses so they could wriggle out of it with a "misunderstanding".

It's an arrogance that they're so special and important that people will believe them and/or not call them out.

Unfortunately because most people are fundamentally nice, like Professor Moody said in Harry Potter, they are easy to manipulate into believing that it can't have been a deliberate lie, must be misunderstood, or even malicious on Bill's part if he did speak up.

That's why it was important for Chloe to get the other details.
If Bill had said he'd been told that on it's own, and none of the rest had come out, then most of you would have assumed that too.

And I think it's great that you are asking these questions. I still think there should be more responsibility from Penguin for peddling this 'one cure'.

They have been fined previously for not requiring an author to substantiate their claims.

Penguin acknowledged it didn't require Belle Gibson to substantiate her claims prior to publishing The Whole Pantry.

Penguin Australia was fined $AUS30,000 for engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct and made false and misleading representations - it published The Whole Pantry.

I completely know that the circumstances are not the same. But it is about publishing when you know someone is making elevated 'healing' claims. It is all connected to the lucrative wellness industry. Now we know that the wellness retreats were in the pipeline it is even better that TSP deception has been revealed by The Observer.

This happened three years before TSP and Penguin UK did not go ahead with the publication.

Having known someone like this I think he'd have assumed that Bill liked him too much to publicly call him out, and if he did, there were no witnesses so they could wriggle out of it with a "misunderstanding".

I'm sure that's true, but I do also wonder what caused TW to say something so melodramatic and short-term to BC, as it seems like such an unnecessary lie (which was going to be very quickly proved untrue) if it wasn't to get him out of a difficult situation.

Which does then make one wonder what the difficult situation with BC was.

There's certainly a long pattern of them moving swiftly on after 'issues' with people in their last setting. And that whole bit in TWS where, a few months after they've moved onto the farm, 'Sam' (BC) shows up to see them on his motorbike and literally cries with joy at the miraculous work they've done in almost no time, has always read very oddly to me.

Had they lied to BC about their farming experience, having agreed to actually farm the land, rather than just run the cider side of things and do a bit of cleaning up?

There's that very odd, and presumably entirely fictional, earlier scene in TWS where 'Moth' says:

‘Do you remember how much equipment and livestock it took to farm a place this size?’ Moth was now lying on his back on the damp grass, watching clouds mass and then separate, but obviously his thoughts were far away.

‘Not really, I think I’ve blocked it out. When we were walking I tried not to remember because thinking about home hurt too much, and now if I try to remember I can’t.’

‘I can, I remember it really well.’ I turned to him and watched his face, eyes closed, concentrating, as he listed an inventory of machinery and livestock numbers that I couldn’t recall if I tried.

‘The grass is growing now, it can’t be ignored, and we’re in no position to buy livestock.’

This must be pure bunkum. They had an acre and a half in Wales, and their 'livestock' at its height was a few sheep and some chickens. By the time they started the SWCP, the chickens had been long given away, and they were down to one elderly pet ewe.

SW grew up on a farm, but TW had not, had never farmed at all, and can't possibly have had the remotest idea about stocking and farm machinery for a commercial farm. SW is also pretending she once had this knowledge from their Welsh farm and has forgotten it, but that a man suffering from memory loss magically remembers livestock numbers etc from a fictional farm neither of them has ever worked.

The next bit sees Moth apparently deciding unilaterally, that they'll only work on the orchards and cider, and that BC will have to see 'about finding someone to use the grass. We can focus on resurrecting the orchards, making cider and overseeing a biodiversity plan for the farm, but I can’t see us being able to actually physically farm the whole place ourselves’ because they need the 'freedom to do other things, too'.

Which is all very well, if that's what they agreed with BC, but for all we know, BC hired them as farming tenants to run the full farm, so being told they weren't going to might have come as a shock to him.

I mean, this is all purely speculative, based on the obvious untruth about TW having considerable farming experience and knowledge from their own farm in Wales, but it might explain the breach with BC, and the lie about TW's imminent death?

Having known someone like this I think he'd have assumed that Bill liked him too much to publicly call him out, and if he did, there were no witnesses so they could wriggle out of it with a "misunderstanding".

Apparently CH was able to report on this because there was a witness to TW saying it, a friend of BC I believe. Which makes it even odder. Gaslighters depend on it being their word against your memory; witnesses undermine their version of what’s true.