Old poster from all the previous threads back for the ride, but don’t ask me to list my dozen previous names. I was @WellSurely at one point and I believe I coined ‘glumwashing’.😀
Sorry to hear about hair stuff, @Uricon2. And yes, I have always wondered about TW’s sort of feathery vertical white hair.
Though with the most recent revelations it’s hard not to scrutinise these two ordinary-looking people for concealed horns and a tail!
I suppose for me the new revelations suggest that TSP is just a particularly high-profile, remunerative mega-lie in a long pattern of lying, dishonesty, premeditated theft, delusions, untruths, follie à deux, self-inflicted money troubles and, crucially, using supposed ill health as a ‘get out of jail free’ card.
They’ve been doing this for a long time. They’ve had a lot of practice. Only the stage was larger this time.
In fact that it was part of an established pattern of dishonesty makes some of the oddities of TSP much more plausible — the unrelenting aggressive negativity towards other people, especially those who are perceived to have more, the minor thefts presented as done out of necessity, the waltzing blithely past campsite receptions, the aggrieved response when someone calls them on it, the invention/exaggeration of TW’s condition, the sense of their own special underdog status etc etc.
When I first read TSP, I thought this was the uncensored bitterness of someone suddenly homeless and with a dying spouse.
But no. That’s just how a chronic grifter and thief sees the world, as other people who are undeserving of their cream teas and house extensions.
Other people never recoiled from them because they were homeless, because they were never homeless in the way SW claimed. (They’d stayed with three different relatives before landing at Anne/‘Polly’s’. They were on a hiking holiday.) The snobbery and unease they invent in other people is how they justify their own actions to themselves.