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.

Reflecting on it, I think Simon A was generous about the "mistaken identity" (he must have seen pictures of Mothtim and I wonder if he's as bewildered as we are by it) but drew a firm line in the sand about actually changing absolute facts, ie, he wasn't PL at the time. I feel that the article might have seemed to be about a childhood attack of sunstroke but he really wanted to nail his colours to the mast and set the record straight.

Good for him and welcome to the charabanc!

😀

Simon can't bite them because his head fell off, due to An Incident With Damp. I bet he can lurch like nobody's business though.

To defeat the zombie you need to remove its head….

Thank you @User14March that was an enjoyable read and it feels good to know he has publicly acknowledged what’s happened.
I realise I’ve stopped looking for new articles.

😀 In fairness, being pursued by a damp, lurching, headless cardboard SA would be quite alarming in itself.

I’m so grateful to everyone here with such knowledge of the actual process of rewilding.

It actually sounds like an ancient curse - 'may you be pursued by a damp. lurching, headless cardboard Simon Armitage for all eternity'. Maybe I should curse SW with it? That'd teach her.

Yes indeed. It's the kind of knowledge you'd think someone would gather from doing a garden design degree. Or a botany degree. Either really. Although then again, with a degenerative brain condition, maybe you forget these things.

I got Landlines out from the library and started reading it. And I couldn’t take it seriously at all, I just kept thinking ‘this could all be made up’. Some people say it doesn’t matter if it’s a good book but to me somehow it really does. I prefer non-fiction, seek it out and I want it to be a real account.

I didn’t know anything about her books until the Observer article came out, but the whole investigation seemed intriguing so I ended up looking into it (and discovering the MN threads!). Ever since, I’ve been baffled by the environmental stuff in SW’s press interviews etc.

To try to make sense of it, I read all three books, to see what she actually said in them (yes, my brain was mush by the end).

What was noticeable was not what she included in her stories, but what was left out – no apparent connections made between geology and soils, and the resultant habitats, with the amazing and varied plant and animal communities that they support.

And scant if any mention of the environmental sector – including all the nature conservation organisations – in Scotland, England and Wales, and of the work that is done to protect landscapes (that they walked through!!!), habitats and species (a little disrespectful to the multitudes of volunteers and paid staff that have for decades made this possible, maybe??).

Everything was focussed on the farmed environment; to be fair, most agricultural monocultures are ecological deserts. But - this has been recognized for a long time and there are various (? or at least there used to be….) sources of advice and funding for agri-environmental schemes, designed to benefit wildlife (although debateable as to whether the system works as well as it should). Again, not mentioned.

When my brain finally unmushed (de-mushed?) I concluded that it was impossible to decide whether SW and TW are knowledgeable or not about farming, ecology, the wider environmental / nature conservation situation, whatever.

I reckon that everything is geared towards the story; all persons, places, conversations, situations, descriptions are merely contrived stage sets, devices to move the narrative from a starting point of despair to one of eventual triumph and to emphasize her particular ‘themes’. Mention of anything else (especially objective facts, or other persons who have done admirable work) detracts from this and is therefore irrelevant to SW.

I don’t believe most of what she says because everything is subservient to her narrative. I wouldn’t trust her spoutings about our natural environment because there’s always an ulterior motive.

(With apologies for the rant, just an opinion of course!!!).

Playing Devil's Advocate again (I'm going to get a reputation at this rate, or, even worse, mistaken for SW!) I don't think we can take the absence of narrative relating to rewilding or any specific critique of the environmental sector or alternatives that they passed through as particularly indicative of anything. These might have been included in a first draft but removed because the publisher wanted the story to concentrate on the 'healing through walking' narrative or the 'desperate adversity' storyline and needed to be mindful of word count.

Or it might also be that it never occurred to her to talk about anyone who wasn't her or Moth because - well, narcissistic tendencies and everything and she needed to make them the heroes of their own story.

Even good fiction has an underlying truth to it - I am sure former fraudsters have written decent books, but only after they have recognised and acknowledged their dishonesty.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat don’t forget she claimed there was little to no editing done before her book was published. So I’m inclined to agree with your final paragraph.
Really informative post @ThisTookAWhile

I noticed there was some criticism of the National Trust regarding the efforts to remove rhododendrons. Does anybody else remember this? Criticism is allowed of course, I’ve seen arguments for and against their decisions… also it’s her personal opinion and probably part of the “unflinchingly honest” tagline but Tim used to work for the NT. What does that tell us?

Along with just about everything else she's written, I am inclined to take the 'hardly any editing' with a pinch of salt so enormous you could make a path out of it. They might not have made her rewrite anything, but I would take any bets that there were passages that had to be removed and others added to deepen perspective and add more local 'colour'.

She might not even have considered those to be 'edits' as such. Or, you know, she just lied about not editing.😉

Utter shits write good books, fiction and non-fiction, all the time!

MN seems very slow to load at the moment… I had to edit the previous post because of a tech induced typo/substitution I hadn’t noticed… I also wanted to add that regarding the passages where the author does write about the history or current situation in an area, it all does seem very copy/paste. The entire books touch on nothing really, apart from the situation they are in and that situation no longer holds my sympathy.

That's an excellent article and the most factually detailed, apart from here of course. Good journalists are so important.

I did think that since they walked the coast path there is very little about beach litter.

I think both sequels are primarily redolent of an author who had a big, unexpected success and is desperately trying to replicate it.

The problem is that when you’ve concocted a one-off hit based on sudden homelessness, terminal illness and a walk Against All Odds where everything is awful apart from Nature’s Healing Bounty and the Love of a Good Eco-Warrior, by definition you can’t replicate it.

SW says she found writing TWS difficult, and I think it shows — it’s shoe-horned together, the Polruan flat, her mother’s death and the Iceland trip taken from completely different timelines, Moth getting worse, her childhood memories, the cider farm offer etc. It’s a hodge-podge.

And Landlines is riddled with oddities. Moth is barely able to walk in the house and garden, the ‘green life with no stress’ apparently having had a negative rather than a positive effect) yet is dragged off to walk a notoriously challenging, remote trail when half of Scotland is still closed after Covid, and they apparently spontaneously decide to keep walking the length of the country afterwards, deciding on the spot to continue each time they finish a particular trail, despite the fact that RW told more than one journalist months before they left home that they were going to walk the whole length of the country, hence clearly pre-arranged.

Your last point being salient here. The WWs seem unable to admit to their devious behaviour but maybe they will in the future. Hard to say - if it makes them more money and positive attention perhaps they'll go for it. More joy over a sinner whose repented etc.

I've also noticed how damn lucky the WWs have been - imminently facing disaster but being saved by others at the last moment. The relative who lends the money, Martin Hemmings not prosecuting and total strangers giving them nice homes to live in. Many in similar circumstances crash into disaster and lose everything.

Absolutely they’re lucky. It’s just that they always seem to fuck it up again.

They had a nice house and smallholding in Wales, got greedy and stole when they overreached themselves, whether that was to fund a credit card habit or the French property or something else.

Then they got lucky again that SW avoided a conviction and possible prison time for embezzlement when a family member bailed them out and hushed it up, but then they fucked that up in turn by not holding down jobs and keeping up the repayments, and ended up losing their home.

We will probably never know the real circumstances of the repossession, TW’s diagnosis and the SWCP etc, but again, they have the great good luck for SW to write a huge bestseller involving a heavily embellished version of it.

But again, they screw that up. It wouldn’t have been hard to say they’d lost their home through their own bad decisions and leave it there. Or to not keep pushing the increasingly incredible ‘Moth is definitely dying but a walk miraculously saves him’ narrative in two further books.

A well-wisher offers them somewhere pleasant to live to do rewilding and cider production work they find meaningful. But they screw that up by not doing the work at all, lying outrageously to the landowner who considers them friends, appear on tv claiming to be doing the work they manifestly aren’t , and then vanishing.

Etc etc.

Yes, a lot of people would have been happy to have a mortgage on the Welsh farm and worked to keep it, enjoying their family life with the children and other relatives. I was tempted to say some people are never satisfied and don't recognise their own good fortune but there's something deeper going on with their relationship and psychology.

Although they weren't 'lucky' as such with the loan to pay off the embezzlement case - SW went begging. We don't know how many people turned her away before she hit on the half-uncle who charged them a punitive amount of interest. So I wouldn't call that 'luck' so much as 'grift'.

As, of course, we only know what has been turned up. There might be other cases of illegality which either haven't been discovered yet or have been 'bought off' somehow, which they got away with and therefore didn't fuck up.

I also wouldn't really describe it as 'luck' so much as manipulation... appearing to be unfair victims of circumstance/other people's unkindness.. covert victim-narcissism??

I know that not everyone will have been able to find people to bail them out so I understand the 'luck' from that point of view but I feel it's important to emphasise that it was their intentional actions rather than an impersonal force that led them to find 'rescue'/ redemption each time.*
ETA as a Christian I am slightly disgusted with myself for describing it as redemption or rescue (when it is clearly not really, and was obtained by deception), but that seems to be the narrative of her books and parts of life at least