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.

If you could ask Salray one question that she had to answer with the absolute truth (as opposed to 'her' truth), what would it be?

I would ask how many people she had embezzled from / conned money out of before MH.

Why did they really leave the midlands for Wales

How did she rack up such huge debts that led her to embezzle £64k as well as amass a £230k mortgage on Pen-y-maes?

No, only Mothiarty.

😂😂

What their relationship is really like, and if it was a factor in her embezzlement spree.

I'd ask why she left her husband, who she apparently adores, to go off on a walk when he was too ill to join her (allegedly).
If my husband was seriously ill with a life-limiting disease, the last thing I'd do is fuck off and leave him to it.
She probably explains her rationale in OWH, but I'm not buying the book to see.

Just reading about the wonderful breakthrough in treating Huntington’s Disease - teary doctors overjoyed to be able to give patients hope - more weight to the argument that if SalRay was telling the truth, this is how the medics would be responding to Moth’s Miracle Method.

I'd ask her - if you were a cheese, what kind of cheese would you be?

I suspect she's a Leerdammer (bland and full of holes), but she probably sees herself as more of a Stilton,mature and complicated (and veiny, but let's not dwell on that).

What did she embezzle £64k for?

I'd ask how exactly much Timmoth knew about the embezzlement while it was happening and any other appropriated funds beforehand.

@ShrinkWrappedInSeattle the Huntington's news has made my day. In my working life I came across it quite a few times and it is absolutely devastating.

Stilton is also salty...never forget the salt!

That's the Joe Bangles question! 😂

(He’s on TwitterX, for anyone who hasn’t read him - he asks celebs for their favourite cheese. James Blunt is his ultimate goal, steadfastly refuses to answer, and they’ve had some very funny exchanges)

I was just in a charity shop and saw an unsold copy of TSP. As I’ve never actually read it, I took a quick look…then snorted very loudly at a passage in which Timoth is supposedly photographed by an excited couple saying they’re ‘going to see him later at his book-signing'. Salray both feign ignorance after the couple disappear and profess total incomprehension about this mysterious 'Simon' people keep talking about.

Pah! Pull the other one. It's got a finger of fudge on it 🤬

I don't know Joe Bangles, but it's a question I've often prompted book bloggers to ask when they do author interviews. I get so fed up with the 'where do you get your ideas from' type of question that when a blogger or other interviewer asks me if there's any other question that I'd like them to ask me (usually in the pre-interview interview bit), I tell them to ask me what kind of cheese I would be or something similarly random. You can often tell more about a person from random and weird questions than you can from all the 'where do you get your ideas from' ones.

I have tangled with poets of varying quality and fame.

Couldn't listen to the recitation for very long. Whoever mentioned the singy songy voice is spot on.

Wendy Cope has a brilliant male version of this - from memory:

'In crumpled bardic corduroy the poet took the stage
And read aloud his deathless verse, page by deathless page'

I reckon Tim Walker has numerous pairs of bardic corduroy trousers

And increase her mortgage by £170k?

Don't get excited by the heading but it shows it's still a story worth a follow up:

Salt Path scandal rocks literary festival as author pulls out of event - Somerset Live

CH is there though. Imagine a stage with CH and SW and an audience of mumsnetters! Can't think why she pulled out 🤔

Yes, when she pulled out the Dulverton organisers were savvy enough to fill SalRay's slot with Chloe.

I'm not expecting anything big about the story, any more, from Chloe. She said that there was not enough material to do a podcast series. It will be interesting if there is anything at all, though.

Also, as you ask: If you could ask Salray one question that she had to answer with the absolute truth (as opposed to 'her' truth), what would it be?

Have you any empathy with those for whom you have tried to change their truth, the truth - for your truth?

I have a vision of Our Simon in the front row, arms crossed and giving her a stony stare. OK, we know that's his usual facial expression but I still reckon it would creat disquiet !

@beguiledsilence Yes, when she pulled out the Dulverton organisers were savvy enough to fill SalRay's slot with Chloe.
Oh, I would love to have seen SW's face when she found that out.

I thought I may like to go to a Literary Festival one day - but all this business has put me off. If I was paying for star billing to be authors like SalRay?

I've never been in a book club either ... and again it wouldn't have been much good if I'd been sarcastic about TSP's unlikely account of ferries, or why is the nature so often oystercatchers and gorse...etc.

Well, it’s not like a music festival. You only book the events you specifically want to attend. You’re neither paying for SW nor obliged to go and hear her!

And book clubs are full of peiole tearing books apart. You’d almost certainly have had company.

Although if you do a book club as an author everyone is always desperately polite about your book, even the ones who didn't like it (or didn't understand it!). You can tell the ones who didn't like it though, they are the ones who start their questions with "What made you....?" as though you were forcibly compelled to write something, rather than just thinking it worked as part of the story.

I occasionally go to one of two local reading groups run by bookshops. Last time I went to one, the book was by a local author I know slightly through mutual friends, and she called by for the first 20 minutes/half hour to discuss it and take questions. The moment the door shut behind her, the people who had asked perfectly polite ‘What made you…?’ questions started ripping the book apart like jackals on a carcass. I was fascinated, as it was a perfectly competent, but uninspired crime novel. It had done nothing to deserve such ire, it was just a bit lacking in characterisation.

I am fascinated by book groups, though, because of what they tell me about how other people read. I had not expected quite so much of people blaming a novel for not being a completely different type of novel which it had never claimed to be!

The only other time I’d attended that group, the book was a (very good) coming of age Irish-American family saga set over a few months in the late 70s, focusing on teenage siblings. Several people seemed terribly pissed off that it wasn’t a thriller, or didn’t take place over 20 years, or that you didn’t get the parents POV.