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.

PS: the "630 miles" quote was from SW's email to The Big Issue, embedded in @catwith69lives' post.

I have cold sweats remembering a wet week in a caravan in Portreath, in 1978. Started up the path, soon on hands and knees, crying, too frightened to go up or down. Two well-equipped hikers chuckled at my plight, saying “We Germans help, come on”, each grabbed an arm and hauled me to the top to catch up with my only slightly less nervous boyfriend. Far too scared to walk, we had a long and expensive taxi ride back to the caravan.

I’ve often thought TSP seemed like a somewhat fictional account, and that only its reflection of the writer’s feelings were the “unflinchingly honest” part.

The problem is that there are huge question marks about the unflinchingly honest feelings of the author SW because some of the incidents described in the book (cowering beneath the stairs like frightened mice as the bailiffs hammered on the door) simply didn't happen or, as with the feelings described in TSP by SW about TW's terminal CBD diagnosis and impending demise, can't have reflected reality simply because they were retrofitted to the narrative after the tentative diagnosis of CBS in June 2015!

So what we are left with is a largely fictional narrative garnished with lashings of fake emotions!

What @Catwith69lives and @Vroomfondleswaistcoat say about the lack of humour is interesting. I haven't read the misery memoir sorry TSP (although I very much feel that I have and will when I can get a copy that doesn't mean sales and money for them) but is there any real humour apart from the somewhat strained SA running gag?

From everything else I've seen and read, I don't think Salray especially has any gift for the self mockery that is the basis of a great deal of genuine funniness.

Trinit
To: Big lasue
From: Ragnor Winn
Hilig baue
I became homekris in 2013, evieted along with my partner of 30 years in the some wiik ho win dognosed with a barin inis
Aa with anyone finsing chamadio homeleora we were faced with many decisions, but after being told by the local authority that we werar't antided to priority housing sa my huaband wean't il enough, we made a chose. W chinentore to stay, we packed our rucksacka and lived wid on the Bouth West Cocat Path, walking the whole 630 miles.
In doing so we encountered evory form of prejudio and help.
But more chan that we met many echor homeless people, whose numbers contradiot all the official figures
I would liao the opportunity to write an articio for your
magedine, basod on the experiences.
Look forward to hearing from you

I couldn’t read that email so I turned it into type and copy/pasted… it hasn’t come out with the correct spellings but it’s good enough for me to read. I don’t think I’ve seen this email before…. But honestly… she’s even lying to a magazine for the homeless!! 🤬
They really have no shame.

So well put @Catwith69lives it's very interesting that expression of unflinchingly honest, Salray is unflinchingly something, but I wouldn't call it honest and as you point out @Uricon2 Salray doesn't seem to be a very humorous person.

I knew about the Big Issue of course because it’s always been mentioned in her interviews and books but I had not seen that email, I don’t think.

She’s unflinchingly fake.
edited to add: they both are.

So funny @HatStickBoots It reads like Stanley Unwin language :)

One of my favourite SA bits is, having cut long before and carefully seasoned a holly stick to accompany him on his walk (I think the SWCP) his dad drops him at the station and as he walks away Dad shouts "You've forgotten your staff, Moses!" and he slinks back to retrieve it.

I think it's interesting too that she's using the name Raynor Winn to the Big Issue, despite the fact that TSP hadn't yet been published and therefore there was no need for her to use her 'pen name'. I would have thought it would have been more understandable for her to use her real name to contact BI, with a short explanation that she'd used a pen name to publish under.

It's almost as though she didn't want ANYONE to associate Sally Walker with Raynor Winn, even at that stage (when there was no reason to believe that the book would even be successful).

I think the female reader was supposed to warm to and possibly relate her self put downs as she writes about her burnt nose and the state of her hair, the way she describes her body when she sees it in the shower mirror and starts comparing herself with the wife and the other women at the place where moth gets a massage. This might be thought of as self deprecating humour but it didn’t make me laugh, it made me feel bad, sad and wanting to comfort her because I believed the backstory. Of course it was all a load of rubbish written to emotionally manipulate … so no, not humorous at all. Her humour is often at other people’s expense.

Yes, that’s brilliant!

Yes @Vroomfondleswaistcoat this name business has always been fishy, lots of people have nicknames, I know many Dave's who use alternatives, when she has been asked, no one asks her why Moth uses her maiden name as his surname, they most definitely wanted to leave their old identities behind them.
You are right @HatStickBoots she does do that horrible thing of making a joke at others expense.

Exactly, yes. Very obvious now why that was.
This project was completely pre meditated, from the initial idea of writing the book to thinking about how to promote/plug it first in a seemingly innocent way. Her reasons for using pen names do not seem to be the ones she claims in her rebuttal.

They were trying to conceal any association with the very dubious "old lives" before the book, not for any literary reasons.

Quite difficult these days, as Chloe H has proved. My gt gt grandfather (1870s) disappeared after the birth of his daughter and much digging doing the family history showed that she was taken in and brought up by his sister, her mother is still a mystery, not married of course.

I stumbled across him a few years ago, 200+ miles away, census decades later, married. With a singular and frankly Jeremy Kyle like lack of taste, a daughter of the marriage had the same name as Gt Gran. Ratbag.

You'd find it more difficult to vanish now, Jeremiah 😂

ETA there was a family story that her family were "posher" than his. It wouldn't be hard.

Showing our age now!
"For the Best Bitter in a Keggiflade" was I remember a "Professor" Stanley Unwin advert for a fizzy drink!

I had forgotten that he was a professor (it's my age :) I think he was a professor of gobbledegook :)

Thanks for this! I didn’t know of him.

I'm glad you were amused @HatStickBoots , I like you don't remember seeing the email that @Catwith69lives posted, but it could just be a long time ago :) it's interesting that an organisation like the Big issue who know about homelessness, did not check Raymoth out more, I can only imagine seeing that email they would have compassion and presumably, it would be a chance for them to discuss an aspect of homelessness, which they had less experience of.

We know Tim was not diagnosed with CBD or CBS or any such thing in 2013, so any claim about going to the housing office and being told that Moths health would not factor into their housing situation was a fabrication that can be proven, as Salray has confirmed this by publishing the health papers on her website. As I think @Vroomfondleswaistcoat said the email was set up and the Raynor name was being used, it's a really good email for confirming many fabrications.

I know they had to leave their house at some point, what year was it? Had we established where they were between eviction and 2015 SWCP walk?

I just feel like SalRay somehow hijacked the Aussie couple’s backstory even though both couples were technically homeless, the “F- it, we will live in a van, house sit and walk round Cornwall” can-do attitude of David and Joanne seems more like the positive, adventurous, backstory that glumwashing SalRay wanted.

Indeed. It's also intriguing to note that raynorwinn.co.uk became registered just two weeks after the printed version of her article...yet she had no agent or deal yet. Maybe it was initially planned as a vehicle to self publish akin to HNTDDD via Gangani except without a bizarre house raffle scheme.

This is one reason why I always felt this was all a PR stunt with the help of an agent and/or PRH already in place pre-Big Issue. It would explain the rather hard-to-believe timeframe of how a book by a debut author was written in 6 months (as alleged by RW stating she started in late 2016 and had LSB finished in May 2017) and then finding agent, publisher and all the work needed to publish in just 7-8 months. The explanation being, it took a lot longer with an agent's and/or PRH help.

I think you are right @SimoArmo that would explain why the Big issue didn't investigate, they would have felt everything was above board if Salray already had people.

Absolutely! I can truly believe this. Her life of fraud has no boundaries. The evidence is in every detail. She knew she couldn’t make any friends by telling the truth so she stole somebody else’s. She is continuously stealing.