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.

Of course, Sally is writing about Raynor… who is really not that smart… in comparison to Sally who is rather cunning.
My posts will be construed as “vitriol” no doubt, by the lady herself, but I think I am allowed to take the Mickey out of someone who has made a business out of conning others.
edit to add, your post is brilliant!

Of course, Sally is writing about Raynor… who is really not that smart… in comparison to Sally who is rather cunning.

A very good point @HatStickBoots . I think there is quite a gulf between the wide eyed child of nature schtick and reality.

Dear @HatStickBoots you are not allowed to let the following stop you from acerbic and very funny comments.

You wrote: This is the walk they were inspired to do by a book that hadn’t been printed yet.. when they first met.

Wainwright's Coast to Coast was published in 1973 - when she was 10. So it is another blatant lie (just a different one!). I have picked up on this before but have been looking at the very little there is about OWH again.

It is this pumping up the huge connection the couple have, how extra tragic it is that they can't do it together, burying all these things in the winter narrative:

When I first met Moth, I was a teenager. It was a long time ago, and I even now I can remember sitting in the college canteen having our very first conversation. The Coast to Coast walk had just been designated as a walk, you know, and Wainwright’s book had just appeared, and I can remember Moth talking about it. He was so excited, saying this will be a fantastic thing to do. I really want to do this thing. So our very first conversation was straight into this. We really wanted to do it throughout our life together; it was something we were always going to do together, but then a downturn in his health meant we didn’t do it. So I ended up doing it alone.

Raynor Winn On Winter Hill | Muddy Stilettos Cornwall | Muddy Stilettos

Of course, yes… thank you @BeguiledSilence ! Published when she was 10. I knew it was something improbable. It’s hard to keep up with all the lies and facts.

I’m now seeing French and Saunders version playing out in my mind.

Yes and I had no memory of what @Peladon shared this morning about the real first book, HNTDDD, so was grateful for that.

That was interesting to me because it doesn’t seem to have been ‘fact checking’, exactly, just checking that the use of a public figure’s name as a running gag was ok with him. SA suggests he wasn’t entirely sure what he was being asked for, but he okayed it because the Walkers sounded down on their luck.

By the time he was asked to ok it again for the film, the Walkers are flying high, and he’s less tolerant of being the running gag in what is now a glossy, high-profile money-spinner, and isn’t ok with them changing reality so that he’s already poet laureate at the time of the walk, just for extra lols in the script. He’s insisting that his own reality isn’t up for reinvention for someone else’s enterprise to get a laugh, and absolutely, I think he’s referencing TSP’s loose relationship with fact.

I can’t actually remember whether he’s just referenced as SA or the PL in the film?

But it does bring up the subject again of what due diligence was done by both PRH and the film producers.

I agree. It would seem that “due diligence” is just a buzz word. It’s astonishing that “it’s not real” was offered as an argument to justify themselves to SA. They had no integrity at all and no respect for him!

I am sharing this because I am still not happy about the publisher, not because the circumstances are identical - they never are.

After all, the standing of a publisher can confer authority on a published work.

The ‘hole’ in the pantry story: should Penguin have validated Belle Gibson’s cancer claims?

I think that part of her attempt to replicate the success of TSP in subsequent books is that she has to find a way of making them look hapless, victim-y and a bit on the back foot/down on their luck.

The fact is that TSP has made them rich, leisured people with ample time to take off and walk because they don’t need jobs, essentially makes them the people they claimed to pretend to be in TSP. Moneyed retirees with no responsibilities who can afford to walk LD trails at their leisure for fun.

Objectively, the walk in TWS is an expensive holiday in a famously expensive country with friends, so SW has to make pious noises about thank heavens they don’t have to pitch a tent on the grass under the airport flight path, patching her old rucksack, and poor old Moth struggling and losing a tooth in his Mars Bar to stop us noticing that they take an international flight and stay in a hotel to do this walk. It’s not two homeless people semi-starving in a tent, it’s two comfortably-off people going on holiday to walk a tourist path.

Again, the walk in LL is a four-month holiday which involves a car collection service, numerous hotels and taxis, buying bicycles for one stint and posting them home, ordering kit online from their smartphones for delivery to a hotel etc etc. To stop us noticing this, there’s all that guff about Moth’s deterioration, ill-fitting boots, rain, Dave worrying that Moth’s too ill for the walk, and Scottish people not serving them inside cafes because they’re not locals etc.

It’s what SA put his finger on in the NS piece, really. That he gave his blessing to the use of his name in TSP largely because they sounded poor and desperate. But that he was less inclined to be lenient with them rearranging his career timeline for laughs by the time TSP had become a glossy, best-selling, award-winning phenomenon being adapted for film. This couple are definitely no longer ‘down on their luck’. It’s just that they’re trying to stop us noticing because the ‘brand’ is ‘stoical, relatable, child of nature victims’.

SA's scruples and not getting pulled into the Raymoth World of Invented Scenarios any further than (kindly) not questioning use of his name in the first book has stood him in good stead post scandal, as being truthful tends to.

I haven't seen the film but imagine if he was referred to as PL at the time despite his objection, he would have said something, he has plenty of avenues to do so. "PL slams lie in new film" wouldn't have been great publicity.

It’s unlikely it would have been minus 10 when SW did the walk. In most parts of the UK the temperature rarely drops to this level even at night so another huge exaggeration.

I did wonder about that. It can be paired with the other exaggeration in TSP about it being 38 degrees in Cornwall (no matter if it is 2013 or 2015).

The truth from 18 July 2022:

Analysis: David Braine, BBC Spotlight weather forecaster
Temperatures above 30C (86F) are quite rare for Cornwall and Devon - we have a long coastline and nowhere is too far away from the sea. This means mild winters and comfortable summers.
Today, we have reached 36C (96.8F) in Bude, Cornwall, and 35C (95F) Chivenor, Devon. A new ,record for Cornwall, beating the previous high of 33.9C (93F) in June 1976.

The muddy stilettos page makes interesting reading now, with all that we know.
Some gems of phrases from the interviewer and SW:

- How did it feel to see yourself on the big screen, but through someone else’s eyes – a new fictionalised version, and then through the eyes of the audience watching?

.-... So to watch that film, it put me straight back under the stairs with the bangs at the door and and back in all those moments that maybe weren’t that easy. So yes, it’s really strange to see “you”, well, some version of me, anyway, on the screen.
..
When I interviewed Poppy, the location manager, she was telling me about having to film two or three different scenes in one location.
-That’s the constraints of a low budget film. We couldn’t use all of the locations that we would have loved to have seen. The cost of getting everyone around means it had to be confined geographically...So, for example, The Valley of the Rocks, or Holywell beach, above, has to become four or five different locations. But it’s fantastic that our coastline allows for that; that it is so varied even in one spot that it was possible.

As a viewer, I was a bit frustrated that you never got to Land’s End, because that’s such a big thing in the book.
-They were due to film at Land’s End but I think the weather stopped it. .., and they didn’t have the time to come back again. But again, that’s the constraints of a low budget film.
It was a shame that so much of that path wasn’t seen though. Maybe if we had been working with five times the budget!

...And what about the Cornish coast path? Any revisited favourite parts?
...It was beautiful. Absolutely stunning. It’s different every time we visit. Because you bring yourself to the path, and you take from it whatever you’re open to taking from it at that moment in time.
😂😂😡

Just come across an interesting passage in Landlines (audiobook version). They are on the Pennine and approaching Marsden where Simon Armitage grew up.

(Apologies for any mistakes in punctuation. I'm typing what I'm hearing on Audible)

"I've never met Simon Armitage. He followed in our footsteps on the SWCP. Often days, sometimes only hours behind. For miles of the path people were waiting for a famous poet to pass their house. Many of them with no idea what he looked like. Just knowing he was a middle aged man with a rucksack, heading west. But in preparation for this stranger they had made tea and cakes and all manner of baked goods to offer to the wandering wordsmith as he passed. Moth looks nothing like Simon Armitage but as he went by, middle aged with a rucksack heading west, they came out of their houses with their offerings. We were hungry, sometimes possibly starving and they'd put so much care into their baking it would have been rude not to accept"

There is no mention of any of this in the Salt Path.

Did the real Simon Armitage have this happen to him?

I've read Simon's book about the SWCP walk. He had people join him occasionally but it was very carefully planned, with meetings at agreed spots to take him to his hosts for the night (they usually picked him up) and the scheduled reading. I really, really don't remember him talking about people showering him with homemade baked goods carefully prepared in anticipation of his passing!

Also, there must be lots of middleaged men with rucksacks walking the path at any given time. If they knew who SA was (which they would if they registered the walk) a burly man with dark hair at the time, why wouldn't this profusion of poetry lovers pick someone who actually looked a bit more like him to press cakes upon?

Sheer fantasy IMHO.

"Offerings" is an interesting choice of words. Appropriate for saints.

Though I don't see it as being very upstanding to take gifts (food or otherwise) that were intended for someone else.

And they don't look "hungry, possibly starving" in any of the photos I've seen.

It seems unlikely that huge numbers of people would be so excited that a poet would be passing through their neighbourhood.

But let's assume that that's true. Assume also that they put immense care into making home-baked goods for him.

Wouldn't such people, either before they got so excited in the first place, or at least when they were about to seek out their chosen one and bestow their offering on him, do a quick Google search to see what he looked like?

Or, that there are just lovely kind people who know trekkers will be passing by this time of year, and will offer refreshments? I know in some parts they will put up signs that anyone in need can knock for cold water/bathroom visit on very hot /busy days

"I've never met Simon Armitage. He followed in our footsteps on the SWCP. Often days, sometimes only hours behind. For miles of the path people were waiting for a famous poet to pass their house. Many of them with no idea what he looked like. Just knowing he was a middle aged man with a rucksack, heading west. But in preparation for this stranger they had made tea and cakes and all manner of baked goods to offer to the wandering wordsmith as he passed. Moth looks nothing like Simon Armitage but as he went by, middle aged with a rucksack heading west, they came out of their houses with their offerings. We were hungry, sometimes possibly starving and they'd put so much care into their baking it would have been rude not to accept"

”It would have been rude not to accept”
I cannot believe how she manages to find an excuse for every bit of inappropriate behaviour on their parts!

Better to bestow the use of your loo to walkers, than to have said walkers bestowing their wild poos on your local beach or footpath.

I doubt if SW and MW were walking the SWCP at the same time as SA. His book Walking Away was published in 2015 and TSP in 2018. SA's walk was well publicised at the time and there were numerous reviews when his book was published. I imagine opportunist SW decided to fabricate a story after seeing the publicity.

Theres no chance that the people expecting to see Simon Armitage did not know what he looked like. I thoroughly recommend “Walking home” and “Walking away”, especially if you need to cleanse your palette after an overdose of Walker Winn.

To connect the above article and my scratching around to find everything I can about OWH ....

I think that it was the Latitude Festival when SalRay and Simon Armitage were, eventually, to meet. Of course, she cancels all her upcoming events after the expose. In the New Statesman article he says:

Last month, steering towards warmth and brightness, we drove from the Latitude Festival in Suffolk to St Ives in Cornwall

Leading up to the Latitude Festiva, 24-27 July 2025. the organisers do:
In conversation with Raynor Winn on 11 June. She is very animated (obviously a lot more unguarded and excited) about another new project with the band in the spring, in April.

So maybe this is what we are being teased that is to come, as well? Or, is the music, and Sal's writings, the 'creative' part of the creative wellness retreats?

If you want to just hear this bit it is from 15.27 mins:

My goodness, she can really waffle on about nothing can’t she? Goobbledegook!