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’ve listened to the band but not anything from the Saltlines tour. I’m scared to. I don’t suppose the lyrics/prose are in print anywhere because that would be preferable. I’m concerned that she’s appropriating old Cornish folk tales but I won’t know unless I listen. Ugh.. stuck between a rock and hard place here.
I love Gigspanner.

I've only seen bits of Salrays performance but I don't get much old Cornish folktale, more a selection of words like "wind...life...sea... forever" cobbled together as a phrase with portentous delivery. Perhaps I'm missing something.

I've never seen Gigspanner but their stuff looks great, really talented. I'm very glad she never corrupted the wonder that is Seth Lakeman with this nonsense, though.

oh god no, what fresh hell is this? As if we haven't suffered enough......

I have been pondering the question of the references required for TW's course at Plymouth. My assumption is that they were duff (I know, I know, who'dathunk it?) and created by the WWs in the same way as Gangani appeared to have a whole behind the scenes staff. In reality, it's highly unlikely that the admissions office would have cross-checked the references. Given the numbers most university admissions offices are dealing with, references are taken at face value and it's another process box that's ticked, especially if TW applied via UCAS.

Is walking a good way to walk off a history of embezzlement? Or does it only cure medical problems?
Good to know all you have to do is leave your job and home and spend a month or two stealing fudge and not paying camping fees.

Thinking about it some more, I wonder if she's done the same thing with the menopause as she's done with Tim's illness? Taken a superficial term (in his case she's taken CBD but ignored anything like 'atypical' or 'slow progressing' or even 'CBD-like symptoms, and in hers the word 'menopause') and gone immediately to the absolute worst case scenario.

So, in her mind, Tim was going to die almost immediately, going downhill (healthwise) very quickly. Menopause was going to be sweats, brain fog, aches pains and immobility and every other symptom that she'd ever read about.

It simply didn't occur to her that Tim might be so atypical that his symptoms were only occasional and not severe and that she might pass through menopause without any symptoms at all. And she's conflated all this with 'doing a lot of walking' and come up with 'walking cures everything.'

We all know that exercise IS good for us. But it's not the universal panacea that she's selling it as, and it just doesn't seem to cross her mind that THIS IS JUST A SAMPLE OF TWO PEOPLE.

So funny!🤣

Just hopping back onto this thread after a long absence to note that I’m now dreading Salray's next move: Walking Through the Menopause with Raynor Winn…..possibly the start of a whole new career pivot. Please God, no.

Yes! And yet…

I have never sought to offer medical advice in my books or suggest that walking might be some sort of miracle cure for CBS, I am simply charting Moth’s own personal journey and battle with his illness, and what has helped him.

🤔
Says she never sought to offer medical advice and writes three books doing just that and considers writing one about the Menopause and walking. Oh and the Creative wellness retreat.
Heres an idea Sal: Write a series of books on the topic of how to contradict yourself in six easy lessons with the bonus book Gaslighting for Beginners.

If it hadn’t been for that doity rat Chloe H, darned pesky journalist! shakes fist
Yes. I think you’re correct!

In the same Woman and Home interview she says that doctors were baffled by Moth’s miraculous improvement. Does it actually say any of this in the medical letters she released this summer?
I would also think that if he was a medical miracle then he would have been called up for clinical trials on the disease.
And now she also has an answer for the menopause - maybe this would have been covered in the wellness retreat as it would be a very lucrative market.

Thank you to the people who shared the clips of SW performing. I didn’t get beyond fifty seconds into either, because they’re pretty much exactly what I imagined, minus the tambourine. Cringeorama.

Leaving aside TSP’s loose relationship to reality, what was in it for Gigspanner?

I know nothing about English folk, so I don’t know the musicians at all (that woman violinist has a beautiful voice) but can the draw of SW’s fame to audiences really have made reputable musicians with a lot of gigging experience think it was worth it to have somebody so obviously amateur up on stage reciting nonsense about the darkness stretching her soul?

And I was struck again by how difficult I find her to understand. It’s her difficulty in pronouncing both ‘r’ and ‘l’ sounds. If I hadn’t known that the tour was called Saltlines, because it appeared on screen in one of the clips, I wouldn’t have known that’s what she was saying.

Which is not to say, obviously, that people with speech differences shouldn’t be public performers (and I’ve encountered so many extraordinarily talented writers, particularly poets, who read their own work very badly), only that, as well as the fact that she’s obviously not used to performance, and the fact that the material is terrible, it seems to make her a deeply unlikely person to be recruited by a reputable band?

In a former life I spent a lot of time around poets performing their own work, sometimes with musical accompaniment. It was usually a cringe-making experience as poets (imvho) generally adopt that very distinctive, and intensely irritating, 'special' sing-songy voice to perform their immortal words, though there are some honourable exceptions who do it really well.

Let's just say that Salray isn’t one of the ones who do it really well.

Well, if you add in the death of the beloved sheep, you've got one of those tragic stories that used to be on Simon Mayo's radio show. The 'confessions' segment. When reading your post, all I could here was the music they used whilst Mayo softly intoned the litany of a listener's tragic story...

Especially for yoouuuu.....

To everyone who wanted to see written words from the Saltlines tour, for thirty quid you can buy a copy of 'The Saltlines Journal' from the Gigspanner website: 'SALTLINES' A JOURNAL. | Shop | Gigspanner

The perfect Christmas stocking filler.

(You may possibly need a sick bag on hand to read the accompanying blurb though).

THIRTY QUID?!!!!!!

Just seen this

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/saltlinesajournal/saltlines-a-journal

Including this

“Saltlines is beautiful. Exquisite musicianship and truly soulful music, led by the radiant Raynor Winn, who performs prose about the sea, nature and love alongside the wonderful Gigspanner Big Band. A must see. A gorgeous night that sends you out of the theatre smiling. It's just what we need right now.”

Marianne Elliott OBE Director (War Horse)

I do think people who should know better really had drunk the Koolaid and must be regretting it now.

@WynkenDeWorde totally agree re some poets needing to stay far away from performance. I've heard recordings of a few acknowledged great poets and TS Eliot was utterly dire, surprisingly a snatch of Siegfried Sassoon was commanding and excellent, far from the Edwardian upper class drawl of his normal speaking voice. It's a lottery even when they're reading wonderful words and the Saltlines stuff by Salray is not wonderful words.

It's too easy to berate a performer for their choices and, in this case, I think it dilutes the case against the WWs. These threads aren't about dragging their choices through the dirt (although I firmly agree that SW is NOT a born performer and should have kept her mouth shut, but I think she got overblown ideas about her own ability), but about the inaccuracies and general inventions involved in the writing of the books. This isn't about piling infamy on infamy but about pointing out that a book that is labelled as 'unflinchingly truthful' is nothing of the sort.

Amusing though it is to trash someone's truly awful and entirely unwarranted 'performance poetry'.

I see your point, but in a way it does sort of fit in. This is a woman who, in her books, painted herself as an introverted, reclusive type. The sort of person who was terrified at the idea of doing her first reading from her book to an audience (or so she said).

The book readings are part and parcel of promoting your work these days, so that will be something she would have had to grit her teeth and get through. But if you really aren't the type of person who enjoys the performance aspect, you're only going to do the minimum necessary. You aren't going to be performing in a band like this.

It just feels like another nail in the coffin of the 'honesty' of the books. Perhaps that's why it feels like 'fair game' to discuss her performance.

Ah, you could be right. I just don't want the threads to degenerate into something that feels petty and nit-picky and dragging every element of the Walker's lives through the mud just because of how angry we feel that we've been lied to.

(I absolutely promise that I am not a Walker, although I do seem to be coming out in her favour sometimes! I just have an overdeveloped sense of 'being fair' to people when they aren't there to defend themselves. I personally think she's a self-serving, publicity hungry grifter who never expected to get as famous as she suddenly found herself).

I'm not 'making a case' against the Walkers at all, though -- it's not a court room!

I'm just interested, like a pp, in what was in it for a folk supergroup, who are all established names on the folk scene, in collaborating with someone who, while famous, just comes across as very amateurish on stage in the middle of a crowd of pro musicians.

Even if I adored SW's books and thought Chloe H was being a big old meanie, I think I'd still be a bit puzzled by why any of Gigspanner thought that collaborating was a good idea. I mean, I gather the initial idea came from Pater Knight's wife, who is the band's manager, who'd liked the TSP, but wouldn't you want to check whether the person you were collaborating with was able to perform? Or maybe the original idea was that she'd just provide the words and not appear on stage?

Presumably there's no way of knowing whether they sold a lot more tickets with her on board. One assumes so.

I mean, I feel slightly sorry for her in those clips (I hadn't ever watched them till now), where she seems to be sort of bobbing about on the sidelines doing a little shuffling dance when not actually speaking. It would be hard not to feel like a total spare part as the only non-musician on stage.

Yes, I do agree on the whole, it's something that irks me when it's unconnected slating for the sake of it, but I do feel this isn't totally off-piste.

Well, I don't disagree, but I think it's perfectly fair to take apart her writing on purely aesthetic grounds -- I think I'm more annoyed by the hammy post-Romantic 'my home is in wild nature' guff and lumpen prose style than I am by the grifting, even though I absolutely recognise that this was the appeal for some readers.

And that it's also OK to criticise her Saltlines performance as amateurish in the same way you would review any gig. I don't think it has anything to do with anything else, like the lying or embellishment.

I also think there's a difference between a poet or novelist reading their own work badly (and I think most launches and literary events have now moved away from the traditional 'reading and Q and A format because it was so often bad) and the same poet/novelist (looking at you, Paul Muldoon and the Wayside Shrines) being in a band, badly.

I mean, I feel slightly sorry for her in those clips (I hadn't ever watched them till now), where she seems to be sort of bobbing about on the sidelines doing a little shuffling dance when not actually speaking. It would be hard not to feel like a total spare part as the only non-musician on stage.

This is a fair point. Even legendary lead singers can look a bit lost when another band member is doing a solo, especially if they don't have an instrument of their own as a prop. My issue is more with the actual spoken word content, because I'd probably be shuffling and swaying too (while feeling like a right lemon)

ETA I think from a performance POV it would have looked less awkward if she had been seated between her bits.

I think you are all right, I just got my Devil's Advocate slightly overdeveloped. I am now mostly concentrating on her telling women that they can walk off the menopause, with extreme indignation. Menopause has such varied symptoms and of such varying degrees of severity that I think advice on how each individual managed their menopause has limited value. You can tell others how you coped with your own particular symptoms, but telling them that they just need to get more exercise is a bit unfair, particularly from someone who seems to have sailed through.

The sort of person who was terrified at the idea of doing her first reading from her book to an audience (or so she said).

And who said she lived in the Polruan flat without having a conversation with anyone for however long.

I too think the menopause stuff is particularly egregious, nay, enraging. Mine was not bad but we all know many others aren't so lucky and there's a risk that people would put off getting needed help, which is thankfully now available, because soft lass has told them to brace up and get hiking. It's totally irresponsible.