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.

Since the website had a link to the Escape to the Country programme, I think whatever the price was on there, would be the starting point, but I don't know what that was.

Also, Gangani Publishing Limited didn't own the house (free of mortgage or otherwise) - or anything else. If it failed to deliver on its side of the deal (a mortgage-free house, or some amount of cash at their own discretion) then it was just an empty shell.

I can imagine the winner making that argument. And I can imagine someone in the position of the lottery issuer, unless they were very nice, saying: "Very sorry, but the amount is at our discretion, plus we're insolvent, so you'll appreciate that the amount we're offering is nothing like the figure you just mentioned - take it or leave it."

@peladon no entrant can select an alternative prize. Gangani reserve the right to offer a cash alternative, at their discretion.

This sounds a little contradictory- entrants can't select an alternative prize but Gangani can offer one?

Haha. "we can offer you money, but you cannot accept it".

I have no idea what thoughts went through the head of Gangani Publishing Limited. But I can imagine scenarios in which no one acquired the house but the lottery generated income.

I think the problem they had with the house is that it could never be sold at market value due to the debt. The creditors would have to sign off on any sale, which they'd only do if their debt was covered. Basically Raymoth had no chance of selling it, unless to an unsuspecting TV participant..i think the house on the tv show was valued at £430,000! So perhaps the book raffle was bonkers desperation to possibly cover some of the debt to be able to sell. The amount of effort they went to with the book suggests they tried to save the situation, otherwise why bother and just let the eviction take its course.

Since the head of Gangani Publishing was Timothy Walker and the two shareholders were Timothy and Sally Walker, I wonder if there is a case for attempted fraud as the house was not free of debt.

Also makes it strange in TWS that she never mentions that they once owned a limited publishing company. But then, she mustn't ruin the child of nature, naive image, must she.

As a completely irrelevant aside, Gangani is a place, it's described as "the Grand Canyon of Bengal".

Or, in a more likely source as a company name, also a warlike Iron Age tribe who appear to have occupied the Lleyn peninsula around the 1st century BCE.

ETA having read the excerpt from HNTDDD, I did not have a burning desire to find out what happened next. If not purple prose, it is distinctly puce.

TW appears the more curious of the pair and I suspect he came up wirh the name 'Gangani publishing'.

Beowulf, botany, dark age history. I suspect that Moth is a charismatic and interesting guy who wanted to move beyond being a master plasterer.

But the lack of much in the way of geology, botany, history in TSP, suggests to me that his input was limited and that SW was the driving force behind HNTDDD and TSP.

Totally agree, I would put money on Timoth coming up with that name.

I think it’s very clear from that excerpt from HHTDDR quoted above that it was written by the same person who wrote TSP.

The clunky habit of stating things in threes (‘The pain, the anguish, the futility of holding on!’ ‘A pure soul, transparent, simple’), lots of rhetorical questions, an addiction to pathetic fallacy (we get a gale force right raising to storm force ten with hailstones literally prising the character off the land) and a habit of omitting the main verb from sentences. The overwriting! I’m probably being a bit unfair here, but is the character hiding in a battered outdoor loo in a gale?

I was wondering if her red, shiny shoes would be poking out at the end?

😀

Is there any legal obligation for lottery companies (such as Gangani Publishing) to publish and/or make available the names of lottery winners? Because what was there to stop them from saying 'oh, lottery is closed, the house has been won now', and just take the money and run? Or saying that the lottery had been won by this couple called...Raynor and Moth Winn?

It’s all starting to make sense now! TSP is The yellow brick road… 🤦🏼‍♀️

Google suggests that there's no obligation to reveal the winners of a lottery.

I don’t think you are being unfair at all. It’s so ridiculous that I can’t stop giggling at it 😅

I can see more clearly now why they thought the idea of the book lottery was a goer.

I recall that on the Accidental Smallholder website someone asked various questions focused on the legitimacy of the lottery, and Gangani Publishing Limited (or someone) said that they were thinking of asking an actor from Four Weddings And A Funeral (Rhys Ifan?) if he would watch the draw, plus they would have some officials and as many members of the public as they felt like hosting. Or some such. I just checked the website to refresh my memory, but couldn't find it (perhaps due to poor search skills, or perhaps it has been purged).

Rhys Ifans. I wonder what he made of that.

Sorry for the multiple posts. The Accidental Smallholder page (which has been cited by various other posters) is still there:
https://www.accidentalsmallholder.net/forum/index.php?topic=25803.0

"We're trying for the actor Rhys Ifans as he was born locally. But I'll keep you posted on that one!"

According to his wikipedia entry Rhys Ifans was born in Haverfordwest, so they didn't even get that bit correct!

Compare the following from the intro of HNTDDD:

The pain, the anguish, the futility of holding on. Should she let go, lift the dirt from beneath her nails, straighten her aching limbs and give herself over to the wind? Let it lift her and carry her weightless, burdenless to come what may.

With the beginning of TSP:

The men in black began hammering on the door at 9am, but we weren't ready. We weren't ready to let go. I needed more time:just another hour, another week, another lifetime. So we crouched together under the stairs, pressed together, whispering like scared mice, like naughty children, waiting to be found.

" We stood at the front door, the bailiffs on the other side waiting to change the locks, to bar us from our old lives. We were about to leave the dimly lit, centuries-old house that had held us cocooned for twenty years. When we walked through the door we could never ever come back.

We held hands and walked into the light."