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.

I have been seeing Sally and Tim lookalikes everywhere and don’t think I’ll ever look at fudge (top tier treat imo) again without smiling thanks too this thread.
CH article has unwittingly led to a wonderful meeting of wonderful minds.

And from me. I quite agree about this discussion.

Ditto!

Hi everyone, interesting to catch up on the TSP threads. My partner and I are currently in Wembury having started walking from the Lizard 10 days, or so, ago. We had our first bite of the SWCP in 2015, prior to this appalling books publication.

For me it is sufficient the Walkers have been outed as... charlatans, fantasists, grifters. I found the book offensive and unreadable and I now no longer have to justify my stance.

A few observations-

The SWCP is truly a thing of wonder.

The Observer revelations have really cut through, everyone we have met knows something dodgy has gone on.

Only one person, who we had already agreed was an arrogant, entitled prat, has stood up for it as 'a nice story'.

The corrupting influence of the Winns is widespread, she/ they are still all over the SWCP Association info to, her books are in b&bs etc

And lastly, did I say how brilliant the South-West Coastal Path is, whether you walk 3, 30 or 300 miles. The sooner it is fully de-winned the better.

@DisappointedReader from previous thread.

I think in an age that seems to increasingly accept truth to be a nebulous concept ( "my truth" "alternative truth") rather than empirical fact it is important to stand up and call out deception... It serves some people well to cast doubt on the existence of truth itself and they invariably have a self serving angle of benefit to no one else.

This 'his truth' or 'my truth' stuff in literature and society generally is disturbing and it needs to be challenged. SalRay alluded to this in her rebuttal statement; that TSP is their truth. But some things are just facts and there aren't different versions of truth: either SalRay stole money or she didn't. Either MothTim was terminally ill or he wasn't. Claiming mistakes were made is a lie - they weren't. Of course the WWs feelings and their view of the SWCP are valid. It's true that people have different attitudes to events: ten people can give a unique account of a car crash depending on where they were etc. But the crash is a fact.

Alice Sebold wrote 'Lucky' about the rape she suffered - she mistakenly identified an innocent man, Anthony Broadwater, who was convicted and imprisoned. I was horrified recently to hear someone say of Sebold 'but that was her truth'. But it wasn't the truth. Unlike the WWs, Sebold wasn't deliberately lying but how can her mistake be 'her truth'?

I came across this subjective truth stuff in psychology and psychiatry with a psychologist claiming that events don't matter, it's feelings that matter. What nonsense. Going by that belief, it doesn't matter that the WWs didn't lose their home due to a deceitful friend but it's their feelings of betrayal about that friend that matter. This could encourage delusion.

[finally finishes thread 16, runs up the hill towards the group waiting at the improbable trig point, somewhat out of breath, waving a half-eaten fudge bar and a copy of Beowulf] Hwaet! You found the shortcut to thread 17!

@AzureStaffygood post. People can bang on about ‘my truth’ as much as they like but the truth is actual substantial factual happenings which remain unaltered, whatever lens a person might want to view them through.

Well, I imagine they did/do absolutely feel 'betrayed' by the half-uncle putting the loan on the terms he did, and selling the debt on when his own business failed -- but whether that sense of betrayal is at all warranted by circumstances is another matter!

Someone else might have been relieved and grateful that they weren't prosecuted and jailed.

But it's interesting to me that SW chose to invent the 'Cooper' backstory to 'legitimise' her sense of outrage and betrayal at losing their home.

That entire fiction, which kicks off TSP, is designed to make the reader feel indignant sympathy and fellow-feeling for the 'little people' crushed by an unfeeling legal juggernaut, representing themselves, living on small change from down the back of the sofa while they work on the case FT and can't work, betrayed by government cuts and the legal aid system, Cooper's hotshot lawyer running rings around them in court, as Sally/Raynor bravely stands up in her 50th birthday present leather jacket to nervously hold out the magic paper which will reprieve them, and is outwitted on a legal technicality. Saintly Tim/Moth shakes hands with the barrister and is immediately given a terminal diagnosis by an unfeeling doctor whose body language mirrors the court personnel. The Walker Winns cling together, weeping, in the hospital car park, then under the stairs as the bailiffs hammer.

You'd need a heart of stone not to sympathise. So it's very interesting to me that SW chose to invest so heavily in this fiction to legitimise the betrayal and anger about their finances that she clearly did feel (but which no reader would have had any sympathy with if she'd told the truth.) She needed to invent an outrageously unfair cover story to 'explain' her feelings.

The whole Orwellian 'death of truth' thing is deeply disturbing and sinister. Post modernism has much to answer for.

Sally Walker is the Meghan Markle of publishing.

This is what rattles me.
I'm not a long distance walker but the SWCP and many parts of Cornwall are magical and I feel they've now got SW inky prints all over them. Particularly hate the way she is so condescending towards some tourists when she was one herself and everyone has a right to enjoy these places.
I think for the people that enjoyed the book, Cornwall is a massive part of the draw...it always is in literature, film and tv if you think about it.

The longer this case (and these threads) go on for, the more angry I feel myself becoming. At first I was merely indignant, but almost every morning I wake up thinking, a la Columbo, of 'just one more thing' that gets me angry again, at least until I put the kettle on for a restorative cup of tea (I provide my own hot water).

I would like someone in actual publishing authority to stand up and say 'This is wrong. This shouldn't have been allowed. We will do better in future, and in the meantime these books are being relegated to the 'biographical fiction' section' (or some other suitable heading that doesn't imply 'unflinching truth').

In short, I want some kind of acknowledgement from the high ups that Mistakes Were Made. Otherwise it feels as though there's still some element of carpet-sweeping going on.

I honestly don't think there's any chance you will get it, @Vroomfondleswaistcoat.

I imagine the very most that will happen is that OWH is quietly shelved, but that's probably quite unlikely. The 'brand'/IP, despite being compromised, still has value. The majority of the type of reader who read TSP and found it inspiring is either totally unaware of the Observer story or vaguely aware, but thinks it 'doesn't make any difference' to them liking the books. That reader is a very simple creature. They like what they like, and when they like it they want more of it on a regular basis.

If Richard Osman got done for massive tax fraud and was writing from a prison cell, the vast majority of his readers would still buy the next Thursday Murder Club book regardless. Like Jeffrey Archer. I suspect it's the same with the TSP 'sequels'.

Might her agent decline to work further with SW? Absolutely possible, but again, the 'Raynor Winn' brand, while compromised, still has value, I imagine, even if the bottom will have fallen out of her being a speaker/wellness retreat touchstone/writing teacher etc.

If you look at GMC's author roster, a lot of them are one-off or at most two-off authors, who invented a specialist product and have written a book about eczema, or who did some athletic feat like running backwards up Snowdon and wrote a book about it. They don't have huge numbers of authors who write a string of bestsellers with the potential for that to continue. GMC are specialists in non-fiction, but say that several of their authors have moved into writing fiction, so, given that SW has long had ambitions to write novels, that's an obvious future path too.

I know and it makes me despair.

I just hope that, should SW turn to writing fiction, unless she gets a 'pass' for already being published and therefore misses out on the slush pile, she struggles to get a publishing deal. I can't see her writing anything ground breaking - while her nature writing is lovely, there's a lot of structural flaws with TSP brand and she needs to learn a lot about narrative arcs and character growth!

of course, the money has the same worth, whoever is buying the books, but there’s some comfort in knowing that SW would probably prefer the liberal intelligentsia as her readership!

Realistically (am I risking sounding like Eeyore here?) I'd say that if her fiction was adequate or mostly adequate, again the brand recognition and the fact that she's already had a string of non-fiction bestsellers would mean she was likely to get a deal of some kind, with an editor prepared to roll up his/her sleeves and get stuck in.

It would probably depend on what kind of fiction she wanted to write. Her brand is 'attunement to nature', so I imagine her agent would steer her away from writing hardboiled steampunk noir as that readership isn't going to transfer -- 'cosy' crime set in a rural area? I don't see her writing something intensely literary.

Do you think she would write again under the RW name, though? I know she is a recognisable 'brand' but that is also the problem from PRH's point of view. Look at what happened to Hannah IM who decided to move into writing/wellness. The minute she published under her own name, she was referred to as 'disgraced' and pretty much panned for having the nerve to show her face again. It would seem to me that the same would be true of SW/RW. She'd need to name change again to write fiction, and even then it would only be a matter of time before someone made the link, PR requirements being what they are these days.

For my part I’m glad things have slowed down a bit 😊. It was hard to keep up, but I didn’t want to miss any of it! I don’t think we’re finished sleuthing yet though.
I’ve had a better look at the house in Wales and the improvements made to it. Comparing the original black and white advert from 1992, Local Planning Department documents, stills from the Escape to the Country broadcast of 2011 and photo’s in the Estate Agent’s brochure of 2014, it is obvious the Walkers have done most of the work themselves. They did a reasonably good job and managed to keep the character of the house. Good on them! Far too many cottages have been ‘improved’ beyond all recognition. Looking at the standard of workmanship I don’t think there have been many tradespeople involved. They have not undertaken major building work, nor have they spent a lot on new materials. The barn roof, apparently the biggest job, has been repaired using the old slates and metal roof lights. The planning permission and renovating plans for the barn by the way (stipulating new Welsh slates and Velux windows…) were drawn up and submitted by Martin Hemmings! This was in 1998, years before Sally came to work for him. The actual permission, after amendments, was granted in 2002.
When they bought the house in 1992 they were in rented accommodation nearby (with two pre-school toddlers) so, to be able to move in quickly, it would have made sense to only do the most necessary work. Probably not more than some plastering, plumbing and decorating. The slate slabs in the living room are most likely an original (not uncommon) feature. The powder blue Rayburn meanwhile is a 1960’s solid fuel model that was either installed already or bought secondhand. If so it would have cost about £200 at that time. Certainly not the expensive item that previous pp assumed was bought with stolen money…
Comparing their alterations with the major overhaul that we undertook ourselves on a similar cottage around the early 1990’s, I reckon they did not spend more than 5K on the initial renovation of the house itself, and then, ten years later, not more than 5K to 15K on the barn. With the 40K purchase that would take their total expenses on the property to around 60K at most. What I cannot understand therefore is how they ended up with a mortgage of 230K by the time it was repossessed in 2013. Mind you by then the market value of the property would indeed have been around that figure (borne out by the fact it was sold in 2016 for 280K). But what bank would keep on lending out money and let the mortgage go up to that amount without the regular income being in place to service the debt?Was the lender perhaps not a regular bank? Could all this have something to do with the mysterious ‘investment gone wrong’ ? I just can’t get my head around it. We were nearly mortgage-free by that time (without resorting to embezzling I hasten to add!).
Have we got any banking/mortgage specialists on MN to shine a light on this?

I agree @Witharelle I'm finding it a bit easier to keep up :)

So interesting about the house, someone said a way back that the originally sales description showed the Welsh house was not in as bad a state as described by Salray.

I don't know what to think exactly about the loan from the family member, it was a lot of money to be borrowing and under unusual circumstances, the relative already knew they must not be trustworthy.

Do you think the investment that went wrong was the French property?

I think that the name recognition would be part of the selling point for for her agent, and whichever imprint ended up publishing her fiction. Unless she's a better novelist than I think she's likely to be, I'm not sure she'd sell otherwise. Or that an agent or editor would want to dispense with the name recognition, even if compromised.

I think Hannah Ingram-Moore is a slightly different situation. Besides being a much more egregious fraudster, bluntly, she's not producing anything people want to read/see/consume. (Other than TikTok 'resilience videos', which appear to be largely hatewatched.)

Whereas SW, whatever one thinks of her personal ethics/compromised reputation/writing style/honesty as a memoirist etc, has produced books a lot of people want to read. The gamble for her publishers is, I suppose, whether they will still want to read them, or whether the same readership would want to read fiction by her. (Or fiction that is labelled as fiction!)

Sometimes things don't transfer across genres.

I don't know whether anyone else remembers 'Petite Anglaise', the Paris-based initially-anonymous English blogger who had a big online readership and then got the sack when her employers became aware of her blog and argued that she was bringing their firm into disrepute and working on it during working hours.

She won an unfair dismissal tribunal and got a two book deal from Penguin. I think the memoir sold reasonably, but the novel that followed it tanked.

Sometimes readers used to one genre won't move into another. The whole point of Petite Anglaise was that it was self-revealing, a real-life Bridget Jones, really taking off half days while pretending to have a childcare emergency but really to see a new boyfriend. I suspect the same might be true of the 'Raynor Winn' brand -- that its readers liked it because it purported to be real.

I also don't think that the Raynor Winn name will translate over into fiction. If she did choose to use it then she might get a few carry-over readers, but usually those who like non-fiction travelogues aren't reading for the writing they are reading for descriptions of pretty places that they know. You don't have that advantage writing fiction. Although she'd be well advised to write fiction set in Cornwall (amazingly popular), she'd also have to show a flair for character and character differentiation; you can't just make everyone grumpy and condemnatory!

SW would be best taking a completely separate and new name to publish under if she wants to write fiction and let her books stand on their own rather than try to carry over popularity. I think things have gone too far and her reputation is too tarnished for the RW brand to work as a fiction novelist.

@AncientHarpy - very happy to say that I started boycotting Jeffrey Archer (even though I had loved his previous books) from when he went to prison for perjury. A small thing, but it made me feel better not to be putting a penny in his lying pockets :)

Something went wrong, that's for sure!
I have the "Sunday Times" print version for July 13th in front of me. A reporter had visited Le Village du Dropt, stating in their article that Moth's brother owned the dovecote there and the WW's the adjoining house.
According to the villagers the Walker brothers planned to develop the properties, but "poor construction work by the builders they hired put them off and they abandoned the project". A local remembers them staying briefly in caravans when first working on the site, but "they had not been back since". Moth's brother had returned "a few times" to do maintenance on the dovecote, "most recently a decade ago".
This same local had met Moth's brother several times, and through his wife had heard that "the English brother (Moth) had incurable cancer."
I do wonder whether it was the French builders who "abandoned the project" because the Walkers failed to pay them.

I read this (ETA photo pending. ) at the beginning of Richard Osman's 2nd book, (ETA it said "Richard Osman is an author, producer etc etc. His first novel, The Thursday Murder Club, was a million copy bestseller. Critics have already described The Man who died twice as 'his second novel' ")
and I'm enjoying imagining sticking stickers with a version of this appropriate for SW on TSP copies in bookshops.
Perhaps
Raynor Winn is an author, farmer, Welsh lass, Cornish woman-of-nature called Sally Walker. Her first novel, HNTDDD, is so acclaimed that copies are impossible to find. Critics have now described The Salt Path as 'her second novel'.

Interesting @UpfromSomerset.
Failure to pay makes sense.
The French brother has done a huge amount of work on his chateau so wouldn't want to get a bad name by association amongst builders and suppliers I bet.

I cannot imagine readers being interested in SW's possible switch to fiction. I think her readers have latched on to her well- trodden format now and there will be an expectation among them for more of the same.