Thread 19: 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 ...

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?

Thread 18: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5422393-thread-18-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. Over four months we have done amazingly well together for 18 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.

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

"I'll fight anyone who says I'll make it to Christmas 2021!"

Do you suppose there's a small support group meeting in Cornwall, consisting of the pink-haired girl, the boy who was about to join the army, a few lifeguards who live in horseboxes in the season, and a small group of woodland-dwelling agricultural workers, saying 'What's wrong with us?'

I hope you have calmed down @BecalmedBrandy Salray is enough to make anyone pop a gasket :)
I wasn't sure if you were being serious @NaughtyNoodler, or tongue in cheek :) I think people are very generous to credit Raymoth for raising awareness of issues, but I think I said many threads ago that I really dislike it, when celebrities and people without any expertise get to be the spokespersons about issues, when those who have the knowledge and are genuinely, walking the walk and talking the talk like @HumoursofBandon mentions, are not given the platform often enough for their views to be heard. I agree @DreamyHiker
I wonder what Dave and Julie are like?

I can’t seem to quote on this site at the moment… getting an error.. but I’m quoting the Gillian Anderson article posted by @AzureStaffy .
I haven’t seen the Marie Claire interview but from what you say, she seems to skirt the issue of saying what she might really be thinking, by stating that quite often women are manipulated to speak against other women.

Reading through the main article you posted, this sticks out.
“There is a danger that Raynor and Moth’s walk from the film will attract many tourists to the location. Anderson can’t suppress a smile. „I wish those people much strength. If you want to complete the whole trip, you have to realize that it is ‘bloody hard’. And you have to check: Moth was so weak that he actually endured all this with one leg. It’s a miracle he survived.”
It looks to me like she was very much being manipulated along with the rest of us.
It does come across in her film performance that she is playing the Raynor character in the book and she has confirmed this in the interview.

I really like Simon Reeve @HumoursofBandon , quite a remarkable person in turning his life around, very good at what he does and comes over as having a genuine curiousity about the many and varied people he meets and their lives.

I know the Salray opus is meant to be centred on her and Timoth, but her inner monologue is not engaging to me at least and the distaste for almost everyone who isn't them is unappealing (even though I think a substantial amount was simply made up, eg the Minack stuff)

Re Dave and Julie (from TWS):

Dave, a brusque, Northern,no-nonsense man who worked hard long hours,but in his free time insulated bird boxes,walked alone on the Lakeland Fells and adored Julie despite pretending he didn't. Julie, externally calm, quiet, unassuming, was under that veneer a tough, remorseless campaigner for the underprivileged.

Oh, yes, Dave and Julie (assuming they weren't hired from central casting as Reliable Sidekicks) would also have to join the support group for the small numbers of people Not Despised by the Walkers.

When I first read TSP and still thought it was a rather brave depiction of how debt and homelessness doesn't turn anyone into the Dalai Lama (which I always want to write 'Llama') but makes them bitter, angry and at times spiteful, I did wonder about what 'Jan' and 'Polly' must have made of their depiction, as benefactors who are nonetheless represented as inhospitable or grudging, implicitly or explicitly.

I always thought it was odd that SW thanks them both in the acknowledgements with a jolly 'Sorry for loitering too long in your bathrooms and using all the teabags', but having done a bit of a hatchet job on Polly in particular, whom she depicts as an insensitive slave driver who forces TW to work beyond his capacities and sneakily makes arrangements to monetise the renovated shed she's told them they can stay forever in. Even Jan, who has let them stay for a fortnight and who drives them to the start of the path, is said to be 'relieved to see the back of her squatters.'

One wonders what they make of it all now. And how much of anything they knew at the time.

I should have said, I wonder what Dave and Julie are really like, if they exist. I suspect they are in cahoots with Salray to get such a good write up, unless the people photographed as Dave and Julie are actors as @HumoursofBandon suggested, hired from central casting for reliable sidekicks :) Salray is so horrible about people, yet there is no evidence that she has done anything nice for her fellow man on a regular basis, if at all. The promotion of the charity was just to substantiate Moths condition. Didn't they have to make up a situation of Salray being kind in the film, who is the real Salray? she hasn't even been able to make herself come across as a likeable character in my opinion.

I wonder what the film would have been like if Gillian Anderson had been able to get the rights. She was perceptive enough to pick up on Salray's guardedness but seems to have bought into the 'walking as cure for serious illness ' schtick. I really wish long walks could cure medical conditions and we'd all be doing it if it was true.

@HatStickBoots

This is the Marie Claire piece - it's more general questions than an in-depth interview.

https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/beauty/gillian-anderson-interview

I've always been interested in why she wanted the rights, because I thought it would be a very difficult book to film, even if you absolutely took everything at face value -- very little dialogue, a lot of walking, comedy pratfall camping disasters, disdainful other people, lots of grim endurance or alternatively staring transfixed at landscape.

I suppose you could do it as a kind of arthouse film where it's almost silent, and rather mysterious, and you just encounter this suffering walking couple, and only find out very gradually and minimally, that he's dying and they've just lost their home.

I suppose the 'invented for the film' episode of the Walkers rescuing a homeless teenager from her violent boyfriend/possibly pimp had to do all the work of all the places in the book where SW shows us how adorable they both are. Like Moth shaking hands with the opposition barrister, the times they give food to someone who needs them more, the fact that they nobly refund everyone who's booked their barn etc. And obviously the burial of Smotyn the sheep.

I can't resist piping up here - you're all too interesting. I thought it was the mark of the arch-manipulator that Sal texted Jason to emphasise to him how they would be highlighting homelessness. He said this at one of the film promotions.

Both the actors were moved by the homelessness but is there any evidence Sally is involved by then? Also, some of you said, the most realistic homelessness episode isn't in the film ..

Hello @BecalmedBrandy hope you feeling a lot better 💐
You are right, Salray certainly seems to know who she can manipulate, I can just imagine her emphasizing how important the message about homelessness is, far bigger and important than their personal story, yet knowing that this film would benefit them more than anyone else and add more credibility to their role as rural homeless people.

I do find myself wondering whether 'Polly' was putting Tim to work that she believed he was actually capable of and it was only SalRay and her need to keep the belief that Tim was seriously ill saying he was being slave-driven beyond his capabilities?

I mean if Polly can see the man is apparently fit and healthy and capable of walking long distances along a strenuous path, and is asking him to do some building work - well, why wouldn't she?

One also has to wonder how much of the whole Polly episode is true. I don't doubt thay stayed with her. But the events depicted on her farm are far less likely IMO. Did TW do much work? Maybe but was he really ill? Probably not. Was the meat packing shed as glum and sparse as portrayed? I don't think so. Did Sally really spend a summer slogging her guts out packing wool from shearing? Very unlikely.

My gut tells me they exploited the goodwill of Polly and did the bare minimum to help around the place or pay their way. The book version is most likely a fantasy to keep up the pretense of homelessness and illness for the narrative.

Perfectly possible. Also, having got them off the path for the winter, SW can't give them a home that's in any way too cosy or a permanent refuge, otherwise there's no impetus to get them back on the path for the (supposed) second stint. She has to work quite hard to stop that looking just like a holiday.

So it makes dramatic sense to make Polly a slave driver working TW into the ground and then pressuring them out of the meat shed they have 'lovingly restored with their own hands' and back to the tent.

And of course there's the heartbreaking echo of the last time they lovingly restored a ruin with their own hands, and were also ruthlessly expelled from it by a powerful, unsympathetic figure after all their hard work.

Whether any of the Polly's farm interlude actually happened as represented is quite another matter.

I am now worried about the wellbeing of both @BecalmedBrandy and @Uricon2, and wonder if TSP is actually having a negative impact on their health!

In so far as we know that their son Tristan gave Raymoth a lift back to Bristol on 17 Sept 2013 and that Moth did not start his course at Plymouth Uni until Sept 2015 rather than 2014 as inferred in TSP, this rather begs the question, what were they up to for the best part of 2 years from Sept 2013 - Sept 2015 if they only walked the SWCP for a few months at most (July-Aug/Sept 2014/5?)

Maybe Sal took up a correspondence course in how to write a best selling novel while researching ways to encourage her chronically lazy husband to stop dreaming about becoming the next poet laureate or presenter on Gardener's World!

I am now worried about the wellbeing of both and , and wonder if TSP is actually having a negative impact on their health!

😂I am beginning to wonder if Salray's next publication might be a grimoire, with a dedication to the beastly MNetters who inspired her work.

If any of us start hopping and croaking, it's a cert.

this rather begs the question, what were they up to for the best part of 2 years from Sept 2013 - Sept 2015 if they only walked the SWCP for a few months at most (July-Aug/Sept 2014/5?)

I've wondered about this too, @NaughtyNoodler . There are fair chunks of time unaccounted for in any of the possible timelines I think.

I'm even more confused now @Vroomfondleswaistcoat, do you remember your post when you pointed out that Raymoth were going on a healing walk, before Moth needed healing. If the timeframe is supposed to be 2013, then Moth is not a terminally ill man, he has no diagnosis.
I agree @SimoArmo, Salray strikes me as lazy and likely to do as little as possible for anyone, even when she is in a position to do so, and as @HumoursofBandon says, Salray uses this narrative to yet again emphasize their loss and the continued theme of themselves as underdogs, even being exploited by others.
I wonder where they were too @NaughtyNoodler and what they were up to, you could be right @Uricon2 Salray could write a book about the fallout from all of this, and I'm sure she would come out of it smelling of roses in her narrative.

The thought crossed my mind too… so I’m imagining a Tolkeinesque scene in my head in which she shall not pass!!!

Grimoire 😂. Or maybe a glumoire

Sallob. I could possibly pass for a more tired looking version of Gandalf at the moment but may leave the actual fighty bits to others. Me and @BecalmedBrandy will guard the fudge.

@SimoArmo glumoire. I love it.

Yes, Glumoire and Grimoire are perfect 👏🏻❤️

Ah, nobody need worry. If she comes around here waving her hexes, I can curse the cursiest curse that ever was cast and she'd be lucky to leave even approximately the same shape as she came.

That sounds like something out of Blackadder!

Baldrick: "I have a plan, sir."
Blackadder: "Really, Baldrick? A cunning and subtle one?"
Baldrick: "Yes, sir."
Blackadder: "As cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University?"