Thread 26 : To feel disappointed - and disgusted and vindicated now too - after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 25 IS FULL

Please see the OP of Thread 25 for all the links to The Observer's reporting and podcast series, our threads one to 24 and so on.

After 25,000 posts there are still new things to discuss:
BBC Sounds - Secrets of the Salt Path - Available Episodes
If you are posting about a podcast, please start your post with the episode number you are commenting on, for clarity and to help others avoid spoilers if they wish to do so.

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. The Observer's excellent podcast series The Walkers (link in Thread 25) covers most things.
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, 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. For over 8 months we have done amazingly well together for 25 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.

As ever, as we embark on our 26th thread riding the community charabanc, keep to the path, no saltiness, eat fudge and drink cider.

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 25 IS FULL: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5485730-thread-25-to-feel-disappointed-and-disgusted-and-vindicated-now-too-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

But - and you all know how much I hate to go back over this again because of my froth-quota being all used up already - we STILL have the big issue of TSP having won an award for being her first book, when she's admitted to HNTDDD. That's ten grand she won for what was NOT her first book. Whenever she finally sticks her head above the parapet, she's got to answer for that!

Now I need ANOTHER lie down...

Thanks for this contribution. I remember that OWH was supposed to be including reflection on their home in Wales - but I can't remember the source for this. Our Chloe had said that there was to be a short video about HNTDDD which would have been interesting to know more of the content - but that has not materialised. From what we know this novel was closer, in many ways, to their life than the 'profoundly true' memoirs.

Yes, I remembering reading that somewhere too, but don’t remember where.

I suppose it was clear that OWH was going to have to include more material than SW pacing sadly along the C2C walk, emoting about nature and TW’s fictitious imminent death. There wouldn’t even be anyone to have unconvincing exchanges about teabags with, and as SW is now rich and staying in BnBs, no passersby will be available to drag their dogs and children away, hissing ‘Begone, foul tramp!’

Plus on the C2C path in winter it’s highly unlikely there will be any homeless people convenienty hanging about to be empathised with or to be told how terribly difficult it is to adjust to living in a house again.

And, let's face it, everyone's sympathies are limited for someone who has earned somewhere upwards of a million quid. Yes, sad to be facing the (fictional as everyone now knows) loss of her husband, but isn't EVERYONE in a relationship facing the fact that their spouse or partner could die before them? And when you've got enough cash to be able to afford the very best private medical cover, then that's a non-starter.

So you've got a rich woman walking along in winter. Able to buy herself all the latest equipment and warm clothing. What has she got left to glumwash?

Everything apparently. So let's suspend our disbelief and enter into this distraught woman's emotion as she physically punishes herself once more:

She should be with her husband Moth, but after forty-five years of walking hand in hand, a setback in his health has put Raynor here alone.

As she makes her way across boggy moorland and snowy fells, she replays in her mind the events that led her to flee, and the emotional pull that has drawn her back to the path, like a migratory bird on a journey for survival.

Faced with turbulent weather, impassable routes and her own inner turmoil, Raynor looks to nature for the strength to grapple with Moth's absence and to calm her overwhelming anxiety about the future. Can she find the renewed peace and hope that previous journeys have yielded? And will Moth find the strength to walk beside her once again?
(courtesy of Amazon)

Yes, ironically, even if the ‘homeless, sleeping rough and living on £48/£35/whatever a week and being othered by smug, wealthy passersby’ thing had ever been true, writing about it has effortlessly removed that particular USP by making them rich.

And you’re absolutely right — if SW is 63 or 64 now, and TW is at least a couple of years older than her, we’re out of the ‘snatched tragically young from our true love’ phase now, and approaching the sad, but far more expected, ‘woman married to an older man faces widowhood’ phase. So that USP has also evaporated.

However, as I do think SW’s one undoubted talent is glumwashing (look at how hard she worked, via ill-fitting boots, TW falling over in the orchard and unable to complete a two-mile road walk and then getting stuck on a waterfall, a broken stove, a broken finger etc to manage to make Landlines look like anything other than ‘Two rich, leisured people go on an enviable four-month holiday’), the one thing that makes me think we may not have heard the last from SW is that all the meanies accusing her of lying, theft, a literary scam and the fabrication of a terminal illness is going to give her so much material for victimhood.

But previously, when she wrote LL etc and managed to string out minor misfortune for an entire book - she hadn't had a film made. Although her books were selling well, most of the general reading public wouldn't necessarily assume her to be incredibly rich. But now she has a FILM and in the public imagination that's what it takes to be so incredibly loaded that all problems simply melt away (it is not at all the case, but there you go). So she is now not only rich, she is visibly rich.

Sadly though I agree @MulberryBrandy and @NervesofSteel she can probably write several more books about how her mental health declined after the big bully meanies decided to pick on li'l ole her and now Moth has to help her to wash and carry her from room to room and she has to depend utterly on a man in declining years and health... All of which happened after she walked the C2C, obviously.

Perfectly put!
We’ve had the Raynor Winn prequel over and over. It’s a script that Sally learned off by heart and had to send Tim out of the room for because he would go “off piste” as a pp once pointed out. We know the true premise of TSP now and even though Sally has minimised it and not taken personal responsibility (“mistakes were made”) it can never be written about because it clashes with the honest truth of TSP. She has rewritten everything for Raynor Winn. The reason she hangs determinedly to the film portrayals is so that she can double down on that particular fantasy.
The “Mother’s deathbed” scenes in TWS are particularly upsetting to read now that the truth is out about the thefts of her money. It’s all so horribly cold in reality and makes me shudder. Sally Walker has sunk to the absolute depths in order to fund their lifestyles. It makes me think that all the angst described for OWH is not so much because of Raynor Winn’s attachments and “battles” but the fact that Sally Walker is ultimately a lazy 🤬 who didn’t really want to do it but had to.

A significant number of people seem to enjoy the writing/posts of people who I find to have sociopathic tendencies and delusions of grandeur. I remember a colleague correcting my impression of Trump, after his first victory, with "he tells it like it is".

In a different way, I assume that many must have found Sal's disparaging remarks about so many things and people to also be refreshingly frank.

All I can see is that unless you closely conform to her idea of what is good and right and worthy then you are definitely material for slating. It works in either direction. The unfortunate Boscastle is berated for not being open, after closing time, as it should have moved on from a natural disaster. The late Rowena Cade has spiteful assertions made about her as she was innovative. Those that are comfortable enough to offer them accommodation, or lasagne, are caricatured with their soft hands or massage parlour.

Which leaves her with those who help and are approved of by her - her children, the big-hearted northerners Dave and Julie and .....?

@MulberryBrandy yes! Regarding the caricatures, the polite reader wouldn’t think or behave as such and so to see these poor victims’ observations in print must be true, you wouldn’t say it otherwise in those circumstances would you? Why would you? Your comparison with Trump is spot on. “Says it like it is”, yes, must be true. Saying the things we all thinking, yes? Justifying oneself for poor behaviour, because it’s what we are all thinking! It’s what we would do?? Nobody would make up a terminal illness! We lost our house in a very vague way but I wore my leather jacket was strong. I was defeated… then I discovered our poor sheep had died…
So manipulative! So far from the truth.

• disclaimer. “So it must be true” is how some people will interpret her books, based on them containing things that are too taboo to lie about.

That is an interesting idea@SaltyTea, we might find out what was going through young Tim's mind when he was dunking his mars bar :)

When i first read TSP I certainly put her misanthropy down to the bitterness of finding herself homeless and penniless through no fault of her own -- I remember wondering if she'd had conversations with her editor about cutting some of it because it made her come across as so unpleasant, and concluding that the idea must have been to leave it in to show exactly how bitter the double-whammy of homelessness and a terminal diagnosis makes you.

(Which makes it somehow funnier that the one major editorial intervention into Lightly Salted Blackberries, other than cutting her mother's death, was removing a lot of vituperativeness about 'Cooper'. So the original MS was even more bitter and twisted!)

She only approves of her children (though even with them, right at the start of TSP, she complains that their son had 'become too chilled for his own good' and their former 'disco-dancing glitter queen' daughter 'had turned into my mum', and the latter is quite a claim, given that her mother appears as eternally disapproving and old-fashioned), Dave and Julie, and anyone homeless or marginalised like the 'bad boy from the posh village' who is about to join the army in Clovelly, the girl with the pink hair who gives them pasties, the surfers who live on Kurt's campsite, the homeless people in the wood, and the fictional shouted-at waiter who gives them paninis and quits.

🤣 I read that and immediately imagined a Barry White record being dropped onto a turntable, the hiss of the needle finding the groove and the opening bars of Barry grunting before it gets interrupted by an ungracious sounding scratch.

I agree with everything said.
Does it make her even more relatable when she criticises her own children? I agree, the comparison with daughter and mother is shocking from the viewpoint of Raynor Winn because Mum was so nasty to her… and yet there she was by her death bed in TWS…. The comparison only serves to reinforce the view that Raynor is a lovely person, so kind and forgiving with unconditional love for two exasperating relationships, stuck in the middle, over burdened. She describes a daughter whose disco dancing and glitter phase was a joy which has sadly seeped away as she’s grown into a mature woman - and here I got the impression of Eddie Monsoon and daughter Saffy in Ab Fab. As always, the reality is different. There is a supportive daughter … and I’ll cease typing anything further on that. Ditto, a supportive son. Maybe Raynor Winn mock disapproves of his “chilled” nature but the Walkers themselves certainly don’t and even if true, they were the ones who enabled it.

And the (slightly disgusting?) plopping sound of a Mars bar being dunked in a mug?

I mean, let’s think this through. The dunking is clearly supposed to strike the reader, as it apparently did the young SW, as free-spirited, eccentric and a bit seductive. The kind of thing that blond-plaited, RAF-coat-wearing eco-warriors do.

But how does it actually work? You dunk it and then you sort of lick a melting chocolate bar, after which you dunk again and lick again, like a slobbery Golden Retriever with a bone? Isn’t it quite messy? Did he end up with a trickle of chocolatey drool down his chin and the front of his white collarless shirt? Is that why the eternal bandana — to mop up chocolatey drool? Doesn’t your tea end up tasting kind of disgusting and you’re stuck with a handful of semi-me,ted Mars?

(I know using a Twirl as a straw to drink tea from is, or used to be a thing, but the whole point of that was, I gather, that it was vaguely gross to look at, and that you had about ten seconds of structural integrity before it melted. Interestingly, when I googled, something came up about using Kitkats and other chocolate bars as straws in tea being a thing on climbing forums? Perhaps ‘Moth’s’ vaguely disgusting seduction dunking is from his climbing days?)

🤣👏 I need a bandana to wipe the tears from my eyes!
The reality of this scene has so much comedic value and I can envision it so clearly. The comparison with a golden retriever just furthers my idea of Sally keeping him on a retractable lead. I don’t think even Barbara Woodhouse would succeed in training Tim!

Did he end up with a trickle of chocolatey drool down his chin and the front of his white collarless shirt?
I think @NervesofSteel has come up with the cover image.

No no no, you're all dunking your Mars bars wrong!

Can't you picture the scene? Tim, locking eyes with Sal, licking his lips in a lascivious way then, without taking his gaze from hers, he dips his Mars bar once, twice in his mug of tea (can't be a cup, Tim's too macho for a cup), and then places the melty morsel between his lips and bites off the end.

Of course he then has to tear his gaze away from hers and duck underneath the table to chew ferociously so he can emerge with a slight smile playing over his lips, ready for another seductive dunk.

Hilarious! 🤣

Vroom, you should write for Mills & Boon.

I can't. Wish I could! Several of my very good friends do. More power to them, the money is great (apparently!).

Although I am prepared to extend my Mars Bar scene into a 'Fifty Shades' scenario...

I think that’s why he wears a cravat, to catch the drips.

I’m using a cravat now to cover my eyes!!

I’ve just seen that Sal has shared an Instagram story which is a fundraiser for a young boy who’s raising money for PSPA because his gran died of CBD. So she is still connecting herself with CBD and PSPA. I don’t know what to make of this…
Seems she is doubling down on the “nothing has changed” narrative.

It seems spectacularly insular and unaware of her. The PSPA were the rare decisive factor in her whole debacle:

Whilst we are thankful for the awareness opportunities their story has provided; too many questions currently remain unanswered. Therefore, we have made the decision to terminate our relationship with the family.

Sally has not respected their wishes and answered any questions. There has been no other update from the PSPA. I suppose there are still people who do not know of the termination of the association, or maybe she is still clinging to those who find the Walkers inspirational.