Thread 18: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

Hello all. I've simplified the opening post as I don't think we need to keep reposting all the links, timelines and so on at this stage of proceedings.

The Observer's original exposé: The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...
First thread: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet
Links to threads 2-16, the other 20 Observer articles and videos to date, Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement, our timeline and sources can all be accessed in the OP and first few posts of Thread 17: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5403285-thread-17-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 exposé items 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 drive-by scolders 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 17 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.

Now three months in, if these threads could wear slogan t-shirts they would be Mark Twain's often misquoted 'The report of my death was an exaggeration'. Applications in writing from correspondents seeking supply parcels of fudge and cider will be tolerated.

Here we are again
Disappointed as can be
All good pals and jolly good company
Strolling round the path
Happy on a spree
All good pals and jolly good company

Never mind the weather, never mind the rain
Now that we're together, whoops we go again!
Whoops, we go again
La-di-da-di-da, la-di-da-di-dee
All good pals and jolly good company

Keep to the path. No saltiness. May the fudge and cider be with you.

I'm of the opinion that Timoth's health issues have been (to put it mildly) overegged and on a human level, I hope that's the case, because CBD is terrible.

I also think that he was kept out of the public eye not because he was ill, but because on the occasions he has been seen (eg publicity for the film) he is not presenting in the way someone who has that awful diagnosis would, years after it was made and questions could be asked. This strategy seemed to work reasonably well up to a point and I wonder if he could not be dissuaded from his moment in the spotlight on the red carpet with well known actors. That level of reflected fame was never likely to occur again and to some personalities would be irresistible.

And standing on the edges of cliffs sniffing in the wind in pure Child of Nature fashion. Or sleeping in a tent perilously close to a rising tide. Or clambering around on remote Scottish waterfalls…

So, we're still here.

One good thing for me out of all this is that I've found Simon Armitage's book Walking Home in a charity shop, so it's opened me up to a different kind of literature. It's only a 256 mile walk though so nothing as grand as the South West Coastal path. I also got I Am An Island by Tamsin Calidas about a woman and her husband who were city high flyers who went to the Hebrides but the marriage broke up and she didn't have the children she wanted. It's also a 'return to nature' type narrative but, as far as I know, isn't full of lies.

I haven't noticed any more copies of TSP in charity shops: there was a flurry of them in the summer but not seen any for a while.

For those who want to immerse themselves by proxy in some of Britain's most beautiful places I can recommend Storm Pegs by Jen Hadfield, about making her home on Shetland. She's a poet, and she conveys the unusual beauty of Shetland really well without romanticising it. And there are wonderful reflections about how the sea connects us with distant places and people, and how Shetland is only 'remote' if you think the sea is a barrier rather than a connector!

Hope the wretched cough is easing @KettleSmocks and the teens have found their Tidy Gene!

Two middle-aged sisters gave up commuting and drove down to Cornwall, stopping in W Looe. They woke up in the morning, saw an island shimmering in the sea, went over - and bought it!

I can vouch for this as I got the boat to the island and met them.

We Bought an Island by Evelyn E. Atkins | Goodreads

I work in an independent bookshop and posted in mid-July (Thread 7, p14) about my observations on the sales of SW's books. I thought I would update you having checked on our current stock situation.

In the past 16 weeks, if I've counted correctly, we have sold just one copy of TSP and none at all of LL or TWS. We still have the books sitting on the shelves, although no longer very prominently. The one sold copy of TSP was bought at the time everyone was still discussing the original Observer article. Interest has seemed to have dropped of a salted cliff since then.

@AzureStaffy I haven't noticed any more copies of TSP in charity shops: there was a flurry of them in the summer but not seen any for a while.

I have noticed the 3 books creeping up on Oxfam Online to 56 in total. What is interesting is the ones that sell are the cheapest paperbacks. They have not managed to move the signed hardbacks that are £40 or £50.

It may be people like us who want to check out the books but not to give income to Penguin/Walkers.

Thank you, I think it’s easing — alas, I also have a houseful of builders, and two large holes in the side of the house, so there is dust and draughts everywhere, which isn’t helping. I’m now able to muster a threatening whisper about laundry and stacking the dishwasher.

Thanks for the recommendation - lots to get into.

Interesting to see how the 3 books sell, or not, as time goes on. Your mention of 'signed hardbacks' reminds me that the £1 paperback copy of Walking Home I got today is actually signed by Simon Armitage which I didn't notice till I got home. More valuable than Mr and Mrs WW's signed books - unless 'well-known embezzler' has a kind of cachet in the future.

This was not just about Ray/Sally and Moth/Timothy’s “truth” but the truth – writing which described fact and reality; experiences which were objective and, in that way, universal and so applicable to us all.

Salt Path controversy and the lessons from history | The Herald

That price is incredibly steep and shocking! I believe there is a way to send the particular branches of Oxfam a message when something is priced so badly like that. The items are linked to individual shops, not one large warehouse. I don’t know who made the decision to price them so high. I volunteer at an Oxfam bookshop and while a respected author’s first edition may be priced at £10 or £20, TSP and its follow ups should be marked at the going rate for a paperback or hardback and no more.

I find it interesting that the whole saga is still ongoing, newspapers are still printing opinions and CH is at Dulverton in November. This is still simmering in the background way more than Penguin and the WinnWalkers would presumably have thought or wanted.

Yes, it has interested a lot of different people. The author of this piece is described as:
A former prison governor, he is well known for his work specialising in murder and serial killers.

Much as I don't respect the Walkers - I wouldn't put them in that category!

Probably not the “best thing that could happen” for what is, by all accounts, a close couple in a long marriage, but I could certainly envisage it being manipulated into a sales pitch. I hope I’m wrong. And I do hope they have many more years together, not only so there’s someone else in on their truth to remember whatever mistakes were made. A problem shared is a problem halved - or perhaps a trouble shared is a trouble doubled?

I was giving an older friend a lift the other day as her arm is in a splint, she said she hates driving anyway and I seem very confident. I said actually I’m really, really nervous driving on steep hills (it’s pretty flat around here), and I started to recount the awful holiday in 1978 when we drove up Porlock Hill on the way to Cornwall. She said, have you heard of that book called The Salt Path? Oh yes, said I, have you read it? No, she said, I’d started it and thought the writing was rubbish, but then she was in the news for all those lies and she’s just awful, I threw it in the bin!

Maybe hers was not the only binned copy.

David Wilson is a criminologist, so he deals with crime of all sorts; he just particularly specialises in murder. Incidentally, I thoroughly recommend his 'This Much Is True' podcast with Martin Frizzel, where they talk about various crimes (not just 'orrible murders') as it's very informative about motive and personality disorders.

Though actually it would be highly amusing (to me, anyway) if Moth’s spotty employment record, or the departure from Staffordshire to Wales, were explained by a spot of time inside. Or if the reason he was still in education aged 20 was because he’d spent his teens in Borstal for being the Burton Cat Burglar, using his climbing prowess to get in windows. 😀

Only that obviously would have emerged by now.

I remain fascinated by what their relationship must be like. One can’t help suspecting significant power imbalances, given that the three books are a prolonged love letter to a seriously ill TW written by a woman who appears to feel unbelievably lucky to have bagged such a handsome, talented, charismatic chap and can’t bear the prospect of his imminent demise.

Only that prolonged love letter has, as well as gaining him riches, now also trapped him as eternally frail and dying, and has presumably severely limited his enjoyment of those riches, and their associated fame and brush with Hollywood. If he needs to look plausibly seriously ill, he can’t be the life and soul of the party at book events, or going on the tear at literary festivals, on every media sofa being hilarious and witty, or picking up impressed fangirls in his flash car…?

In a way, it’s a poisoned chalice. The ‘brand’ has taken away the need to ever work again, but has also strictly limited the ways in which he can enjoy this leisure.

And I wonder what that means for their relationship. which is the other sacred cow of the books.

And just how explicitly do they talk about the imposture? Did SW say ‘You’d better be too unwell to be around when this journalist is here’ or ‘Make sure to limp on the red carpet’, or ‘You need to go on a diet — you look way too well-fleshed and healthy’?

None of her 'anti-pep talks' seem to have worked previously though, do they? Hence Moth seeming to be absolutely fine and in good form almost every time he's been allowed to appear in public.

Great post!
Long distance walking explains how he manages to fight his disease. They just have to keep walking and eat a minimal diet.

ETA: sorry, he has to keep walking and eat a minimal diet. In public anyway.

But those have been comparatively few in number, and possibly explicable to fans as him only appearing in public on his (rare?) good days (rather than ‘We’ve agreed he has to avoid the limelight in case he looks too obviously consistently healthy’). Well-disposed readers and journalists accepted that even people with chronic conditions were not always visibly unwell.

Whereas now, after the Observer investigation and his longevity casting doubt on his diagnosis, if he were to be more publicly visible, every aspect of his gait, complexion, BMI, activity level etc would be up for analysis. (Rather like those comedy court cases involving fraudulent damage claims where the claimant who has been supposed to be bedbound and immobilised by pain after a work accident has been recorded on CCTV playing badminton or doing cartwheels.)

I agree that I sometimes find myself imagining them eating dinner at home and SW saying 'No dessert for you!' and taking a more than ordinarily spousal interest in TW dropping a few pounds.

I do wonder what kinds of communications are flying about between now SW's agent and editor. Whether she's engaging on the issue of rewrites to OWH, or adamant that it appear as originally written.

I can imagine she would be spectacularly difficult to deal with if she is insistent that they've done nothing wrong, other than leave out her entanglement with the law, which she justifies by TSP not being about their whole lives, just a particular bit, and continues to swear blind that TW's diagnosis is exactly as written in TSP, perhaps with a bit of self-righteous 'Well, I wasn't to know at the time it was going to be indolent and atypical, was I?'

Something tells me SW will really struggle with the idea of some of her previously loyal readers having become hostile and disillusioned, at the idea of potentially bad reviews, and at their public image now being associated with lies and crime rather than Free-Spirited Children of Nature. Her appreciative readers clearly figure in her worldview as lovely exceptions to the 'other people are soulless drones and jobsworths' position. Presumably if they stop being so appreciative, they get put back into the 'Other people are mean and victimise us' category.

(I can't remember what name I was posting under on Thread 17, as I've been out of town, but I've been here all along, or almost.)

@FishwivesSalute I am laughing at your new name. When I was growing up, a noticeably talkative woman would be described as sounding like an Appledore fishwife! I feel some of our detractors may find it a good term for those of us on these threads....

Well, the alternative may be to be unchallenging. An edited description (from the Society for Nautical Research):

Fishwives were a remarkable group of women who... made a name for themselves for being particularly loud and outspoken, and became a byword for hardiness and industry.

hardiness and industry.

I think it could be argued that this has been demonstrated here.

This has dropped down the thread now and I'm just reposting so that it is less likely to be missed.