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?

@NervesofSteel I don’t think there was anything significantly new. They mentioned having found Dave and Julie, who didn’t want to be involved - we only found them a few weeks ago so that would have been of interest but is now less so. But I did really enjoy listening. There was a lot of dry humour in the narration, and some different perspectives: die-hard TSP fans, professional storytellers, childhood peers, bereaved relatives of people with CBD, Cornish locals - and excerpts from interviews where S and T blatantly lie. Also a genuinely homeless couple who did the walk and are the opposite of glumwashers.

Oh that homeless couple were lovely! So glad they found a home 😊

Yes - it was Andy who dropped in to the village stores in Polruan to ask about Raynor Winn and was told by the shop owner "Oh you mean Raynor Whinge!"

Post the BBC Wales podcast I'm not sure how much is left to emerge about the TSP saga..

Fwiw, in my mind there is no doubt that Sal and Tim are arch emotional manipulators and not the innocent victims of circumstance they like to portray themselves as.

I'm not sure how much will emerge from their time at Haye Farm but having spoken to and heard second hand from seven sources in the locality of Penpol, there is zero doubt in my mind that the move to Haye Farm and the subsequent rewilding narrative was nothing more than a cynical attempt to exploit a commercial opportunity.

The key local witnesses are possibly reluctant to divulge the extent of Sal and Tim's emotional manipulation for manifold reasons (a desire to move on/not be subject to libel suits/concern about Sal's ability to take revenge on them in print) but suffice it to say (and it's not my story to tell) the totality of reliable 3rd party evidence suggests that far from being innocent victims of circumstance, Sal and Tim have been cynical and skillful emotional manipulators with a very clear agenda of exploiting others for their own commercial success, be that Ray@Haye, the Gigspanner connection, the back to the land rewilding angle and the long distance walking schtick to rescue Moth from the jaws of death.

Sadly although they would like to appear as the "good guys", in my estimation they are the very opposite.

Maybe the last word has to go to their nephew, James, who described them on LI as "pathological liars who leave a trail of destruction in their wake".

Everything that has emerged over the last 9 months suggests that the nephew was bang on the money.

I’m glad that they have been forced to admit that HNTDDD was written by Sally because she and Tim both lied shamelessly and on the record about TSP being her first book. Now they are caught out in full fib, the rest is 100% called into question. The unravelling of it all begins.
The wellness retreat is also dead in the water. That is a very good thing. Two con artists running that … the next step was to start a religion - the cult of St Moth!!
This does feel like the end of the salt path, unless Sally decides to tell her true story to the press ( not sure how she could do that since TSP is meant to be true).
I wonder if OWH will ever see the light of day and if they will ever venture from Gweek?
What a journey.

I agree that there might not be much more to come out, but I think keeping threads like this live serves a useful purpose. There will continually be people discovering TSP (as long as the books are still on sale) and everything that comes up in a search that points out the sheer effrontery of their behaviour, as well as the lies that Sal and Tim have told, is to the good.

Post the BBC Wales podcast I'm not sure how much is left to emerge about the TSP saga.

I agree -- unless Dave and Julie do a kiss and tell, I think nothing will happen until OWH or some form of it is either announced for sure or cancelled.

Do you really think some witnesses in the vicinity of Haye are reluctant to talk because they fear a lawsuit or that SW will depict them negatively in print? I can entirely sympathise with a desire to move on, just not get involved, or not to want your homeplace to be forever defined as the temporary dwelling of a pair of con artists.

I suppose I'm interested in the psychology of people who are prepared to talk, positively or negatively, and those who aren't.

I am still absorbing all this and what makes perfect sense thanks to @ThompsonTwin and @YourMoneyforFrothingandYourChipsforFree is that Martyn is Cooper, rather than James, the half uncle.

This is because of the investment with the bike/trike lifelong friend, we heard so much about. Whereas James let them have a loan. What we didn't know that was the missing fact was how Tim and Sally had taken his parents' money and caused the end of that family relationship.

It also makes it clearer to me why the main difference between LSB and TSP was the striking omission re: the business deal that went wrong and her evident venom towards their old friend.

And why as @ThompsonTwin has quoted above : their nephew ... who described them on LI as "pathological liars who leave a trail of destruction in their wake".

FWIW i think "Cooper" was more likely a blend of Martyn and "James", borrowing real life circumstances from both to create the ultimate enemy who caused their lives to crumble.

Half uncle "James" was only 6 years older than Tim. So it is plausible they grew up together, but less so they rode trikes...step in Martyn for that.

If we believe the investment was indeed the French property, then Martyn was a cause of their downfall (in the WW eyes) by potentially being the catalyst for the investment. Meanwhile "James" ultimately caused the house loss because he passed the debt on to third parties. (I reiterate, "cause" here is meant from the perspective of the WWs...we all know it was their own doing with the thefts).

And get this. The name "Cooper" crops up 3 times in the WWs real lives, which could be complete coincidence, or not.

1.Tim's aunt married to be a Cooper
2.Ros Hemmings' maiden name was Cooper.
3."James" wife's maiden name was Cooper

Thanks @YourMoneyforFrothingandYourChipsforFree - I'd love to see the piece Sal wrote in LSB!

Also @ThompsonTwin poses: Post the BBC Wales podcast I'm not sure how much is left to emerge about the TSP saga..

As well as LSB, I had been hoping for what I remember Our Chloe called "a short video about HNTDDD". As @NervesofSteel writes : I suppose I'm interested in the psychology of people who are prepared to talk, positively or negatively, and those who aren't. Yes, me too especially the main players, but I don't think we'll get Sal so it would be fun to see her unleashed as Ellias - even though we have seen plenty of her fiction already 😈

V interesting.

I’m confused who ‘James’ is.

And do you mean his wife ‘Rebecca’ has the real name of ‘Cooper’?

Am I right in thinking ‘James’ and ‘Cooper’ could be the same person: TW invested money with ‘James’/Cooper but the investment was lost. So, they ended up skint and that’s why SW begged ‘James’ for the £100k when she needed it to pay back Hemmings? On the basis he owed them because he’d recommended an investment that lost all their money?

James was the name given by the Observer of Tim's relative (half uncle, 6 years snr to Tim) who loaned the 100k to avoid Sal going to prison. He is thought to be the basis of "Cooper" character written in TSP but there is no evidence the Walkers invested money in his business (which is why the aforementioned combo with brother Martyn and French investment makes sense as the basis of Cooper). Rebecca was James' wife and her maiden name is Cooper.

Heartening to see that the most recent reviews of TSP on Amazon are uniformly negative!

We are so caught up in listing all the dreadful things that they've done that the entirety of anything half way decent has been lost along the way. So if Sal had written TSP (and the rest), without any reference to CBD and just made it a couple who, finding themselves without much money but with a stretch of spare time, decide to do a long distance walk - would subsequent discoveries of financial wrongdoing have had such an impact?

I'm really just wondering idly here. I mean, I doubt the book would have been published if they hadn't thrown in homelessness, poverty and the CBD angle, but that books which win prizes should have them awarded on literary merit, surely, rather than content? So either her writing is brilliant and excellent - in which case why would the publisher need all the homeless/illness schtick - or she got the gig on the strength of having ladled in the glumwashing and 'we're so unlucky' angle.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat - to say up front I still have not read TSP. So this comment is on the basis of vast quantities of excerpts and my own dippings. As an ordinary reader, I don't write at all, the word that most sums up the writing is "accessible".

That has been my take on it too, that she's writing for people who don't usually read. But that still should NOT have been enough to win the C B First Book prize. Usually writing that wins awards has something that takes it above 'normal' writing; it's more lyrical, more incisive or it faces up to a reality in a way that nobody has ever done before. It breaks new ground. TSP (which is really the book under discussion here) doesn't appear to do any of those things. All it does is play Misery Bingo with a ticklist of awfulness.

Is that really all it takes to win awards these days? And I say that as an award winning novelist myself...

BBC Wales Ep. 7 The Diagnosis

I appreciated the contribution of Polly Atkin. She was being mentored within Penguin and felt pressure to conform to framing her narrative with a redemptive arc. TSP tries to present nature as curative.

We shared her article before which said:

Publishing is so attached to the idea of a narrative arc that peaks with healing that it simply cannot encompass the truth: if it were that simple, no one would be ill. If we could all walk or swim or wild ourselves better, one in five of us would not be disabled.

https://lithub.com/nature-is-not-going-to-cure-you-on-raynor-winns-fabricated-memoir/

I think that while the book would not have been published without the double whammy ‘hook’ of two unfortunate circumstances happening at the same time and the Walkers’ ‘life-affirming’ response, equally, all the responses to the writing have been coloured by the purported circumstances of the book’s production — SW is viewed, not as anyone who was an ‘intentional author’, but as an ordinary, uneducated woman-in-the-street who stumbled into accidental authorship out of hardship. So the writing is inextricable from the supposed circumstances of composition.

I think that’s part of why the unravelling of the scam is so interesting. Once you take away the fiction of the blamelessly unfortunate circumstances and the stumbling into accidental authorship, and discover that in fact, SW had always wanted to write and had previously tried to make money from a previous book, you’re left with some clunky, platitudinous writing, tin-eared dialogue, a weirdly misanthropic attitude to other people etc.

But I think the ‘special circumstances’ largely determined responses to her writing.

@ThompsonTwin — I’ve never seen that photo before. It’s rather sinister!

It reminded me of a famous photo, very strange composition for the photographer as this is so well-known:

NPG x126466; Reggie Kray; Ronnie Kray - Portrait - National Portrait Gallery

I thought it was interesting listening to the writer on the BBC podcast who had spoken to SW's agent. It struck me that she was instrumental in pushing TSP. If an author has significant backing when applying for awards etc, it must give them a significant advantage.

I can only speak for the awards that I have entered (and won...sorry, but I'm very proud of it!). Authors or publishers can enter a book, but that's as far as it goes, the books go out to authorised readers who fill in forms allocating points for each item, (so points for setting, character,story arc, ending etc etc). There's no influence brought to bear on those readers and no ability to 'back' a book through awards. Otherwise it wouldn't be fair, because only books from the Big Hitters would win every time, because they would be the ones who could push their books hardest.

I obviously don't know how the CB prize was judged, but I doubt that there was any influence brought to bear (unless the publishers 'bought' the judging panel, and I think that's unlikely). So an entire panel of people thought TSP was the BEST book from the selection presented to them.

Which actually boggles my mind, but there you go.

But if the CB Prize is for debuts by an over-50, surely some years the pickings must be pretty thin. I looked back through past winners and don’t know the books, apart from Julia Parry’s The Shadowy Third — and she’s sort of an accidental author, as the book came about because of inheriting family letters. Another is by a quite famous actor.

I don't know because I haven't looked at or read the past lists. All I can say is that if TSP was the BEST novel out of everything written by anyone over 50, the rest must have been pretty dire. There quite a few writers who only come to publication when they are over 50 (often after retirement, when they can give time to writing without having to worry about the day job). Maybe the first CB prize wasn't well publicised, so not many books were entered, therefore the shortlist was, as you say, 'pretty thin'.

I'd guess that "RW" won the CB prize (for best debut book) because the judges (like loads of other people) were moved by the (said-to-be true) story of her and "Moth"'s bravery and strength and its near-miraculous ending, rather than because RW wrote better descriptions of headlands, dialogue or widgets than all of the other entrants.