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.

Graham Maw Christie still four square behind Raymoth.

Raynor Winn, Non-fiction bestseller author — Graham Maw Christie Agency

PRH must know that as soon as OWH is published (if it ever is) it will attract a lot of reviews and every single one of them will rehash the scandal. It will be read forensically for discrepancies, especially around Timoth's health.I can't imagine Salray sticking her head above the parapet to do readings and signings even if there were willing venues, let alone interviews where unwelcome questions will be asked.

I know nothing about publishing but I suppose a quiet release in the hope of attracting sales from the remaining faithful is an option.

ETA the irony is the people who are probably most eager to know what it contains are the ones who have a marked reluctance to give her any money whatever.

If rehashing the scandal sells units, that may not be a bad thing from a publisher’s point of view, though I agree publicity would have to be done differently, possibly by a single ‘I made mistakes’ high-profile interview.

I know the editor who bought TSP has moved on since, and a different editor or editors worked on TWS and LL. publishing is pretty mobile like that. It’s possible that, if OWH is being extensively rewritten, it will be with a different editor again, someone who bears no responsibility for the previous books, and this time being given the brief of taking a forensic approach to fact-checking.

Though, as it doesn’t much matter if every step of SW’s coast to coast path is backed up with accommodation receipts and photos of recognisable landmarks with the significant lies of omission and embellishments in the past, any editor is going to have to figure out a way of making the reader trust what they’re reading. And I can’t quite see how that could be done without a complete rewrite where the walk is a kind of self-reckoning or mea culpa, rather than whatever it was originally supposed to represent.

I’m sick in bed and on an ancient iPad so can’t go back to the timeline, but do we know when SW did her Coast to Coast walk? Had CH already been in touch with her by then? Could she recast the walk as ‘I knew what was coming’?

IG posts from herself suggest she did it in January this year. IIRC it was March-time when CH first approached them

Hope you feel better soon @Pissenlit

Thanks. That’s not going to work, then…

Though if OWH was originally due to be published in October 2025, had been announced for that date etc and had to be edited, copy edited, typeset, printed, distributed etc etc, it seems crazily last-minute if she was only walking the Coast to Coast Path in January 2025 and had yet to write about it before making her submission deadline! Most books have a far longer period between submission of the MS and publication…

Thank you! It’s just one of those hideous colds where you’ve coughed so much your ribs are in agony. I hope you’re on the mend from your much more serious ill health…?

I'm currently in first round edits for a book due out early February next year, so these things can move at a fair pace.

And I am not convinced that OWH will ever see the light of day. I can see the publication date getting pushed further and further back - with PRH using the 'mental health of the author' as an excuse. I mean, I expect SalRay's mental health is in tatters right now, and I would never wish poor mental health on anyone, but this is a bit of a 'what did you expect' scenario.

@Pissenlit Though, as it doesn’t much matter if every step of SW’s coast to coast path is backed up with accommodation receipts and photos of recognisable landmarks with the significant lies of omission and embellishments in the past, any editor is going to have to figure out a way of making the reader trust what they’re reading.

I would definitely require that sort of firm evidence to believe anything she says she has done.

The author, and then the publisher, were working with three different dates for her mother's death. The first in Lightly Salted Blackberries, the actual date, and the one Penguin says is a typo. I watched SalRay on the Grief Channel and, when questioning some statement, I said on these threads - I am not saying she can't experience grief. But, to treat such a thing so lightly?

This is what we're faced with when looking into this 'flexibility' .....

Oh, that sounds nasty and uncomfortable. Yes thank you, I've been told it will be a minimum of 6 months before I'm A1 but so much better.

I agree about OWH potentially never seeing the light of day, or the publication date getting pushed gradually back and then quietly disappearing.

They can absolutely move fast, it just struck me as quite mad that SW was only doing the actual walk which was, presumably, a key component of OWH, in January 2025 — so she couldn’t have even begun to write that part, with a high-profile launch scheduled for October. Unless she’d already written endless musings about solitude, bleak nature and winter walking, and just dropped them in, pre-packaged, into a fairly cursory account of the walk.

Or that, as with the Iceland walk, it was just stuck on at the end of a piecemeal book that was really about other stuff (TW deteriorating again, leaving the cider farm after they’d ‘cured’ it, probably to a round of hearty applause from locals, and Bill Cole and Rick Stein weeping with gratitude, plus the pressures of fame, a busy schedule, gigging and how it’s taken her too far from wild nature).

So sorry to hear you’re ill @Pissenlit and do hope you get better soon. That does sound really nasty.

I agree that OWH does sound as though a lot was already written and decided upon before the walk took place. We already feel deceived though by the announcements in interviews where she claimed not to have seen any other long distance walkers and the temperatures dropped to -10….. and we’ve seen a beaming and very healthy looking Moth posing at film premieres and the battered copy of Beowulf and the hand knitted hippie hat banished in favour of pristine and designer alternatives. Sally has dug a hole for herself.

I don't recall ever seeing this retrospective review posted on here before but apologies if it has. It's worth a read...I can imagine its author is among us.

https://thelionandunicorn.com/2025/08/23/decade-the-salt-path-2018/

Raynor’s efforts simply render the magnificent landscapes of Devon and Cornwall as joyless, grey backdrops to her own ceaseless complaining. The South West Coast Path should sue for defamation of character.

Thanks so much @SimoArmo , absolutely excellent piece that really delves into how Raymoth tapped into the zeitgeist and why something of little merit (even without the scandal) took off.

That was an excellent read!

“Every blister, every drizzle-soaked sock, every slight from a stranger is carefully itemised, as though each minor annoyance were a new Station of the Cross.”

What an interesting piece. Thanks for sharing.

They can't release OWH without some form of comment on everything that has kicked off since Our Chloe started her investigation; they just can't. It would be beyond disingenuous to try to continue without any reference whatsoever to everything that is being raised and alleged. It would be like a ten year old shouting 'look at meeeeeeee!' while swinging from the monkey bars and trying to distract attention from the broken TV and smashed IPad.

Pushing the date back is just kicking the can down the road and I suspect that there's a lot of frantic emails going to and fro behind the scenes.

I’m just interested in the extent that SW may have fessed up or not to her agent and/or editor/s, or whether she’s stonewalling and hiding behind the geographical distance between Cornwall and London and ‘MH concerns’.

In which case you have PRH having to relay everything in ‘Operation Salvage OWH’ via her agent, and getting few or no replies. From what Bill Cole and the Parsons say, SW is good at evading the awkward question…

Wonder if her agent has a copy of HNTDDD or has ever suggested she try and relaunch it (with an AH cover design this time round!)

I have a funny feeling that HDTDDD might make TSP look like a divinely inspired and totally successful collaboration between Patrick Leigh Fermor, Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen.

I agree, I’m not convinced OWH will get published. I also wonder how SalRay is feeling now, 3 months on from the revelations. Would be interesting as a fly on the wall in their house, hearing the conversations going on! and while it’s not pleasant to wish ill on anyone, there does feel a sense of ‘what goes around comes around.’ SalRay treated so many people with utter contempt, it’s hard to garner much sympathy, she’s brought this on herself.

But she can't (daren't) admit to actually writing HNTDDD because then it renders TSP as her second book and therefore ineligible for the Prize for First Novel (plus considerable cash) that it won. At the moment this is just an allegation, but if she proved it by repubbing HNTDDD I'm pretty sure the organisers of the Christopher Bland prize would be asking for their money back.

I heard on R4 today that Angela Harding is the guest on Desert Island Discs this Sunday. I don't know when the programme was recorded but it will be interesting to see what mentions, if any, are made of her illustrations for TSP et al. I doubt she will choose any of them as her book!

She was interviewed by Martha Kearney on This Natural Life but although our Simon gets honourable mention TSP is neatly swerved, afaicr.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002gg7h

Morning all. I hope you are safe and well today in all this very wet and windy weather.

Re HNTDDD: Back in the mists of thread time #handwavium, I remember suggesting Izzy Wyn-Thomas = Is he Wyn Thomas? = Is he Thomas Wyn? = Is he Thomas Winn? I think this was on the basis that Salray's father was Thomas and her maiden name was Winn. The pseudonym which would go on to be used publicly for Raymoths' son was also Thomas. Hence Thomas Winn/Wyn-Thomas. Hopefully someone will pop up to correct this if I'm misremembering.