Thread 27 : 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 26 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:
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? | Mumsnet

New posters joining us in the genuine spirit of our civil discourse are always welcome. It would be helpful to get the background from some of Investigative Journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou's excellent exposé items before posting. Chloe's podcast series for The Observer 'The Walkers' covers most things:
The Walkers: The real Salt Path | The Observer
Another suggestion:
BBC Sounds - Secrets of the Salt Path - Available Episodes
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 nearly a year we have done amazingly well together for 26 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.

We are still here after 26,000 posts and fast approaching our one year anniversary together on 6th July 2026, 12 months on from the start of our first thread in response to Our Chloe's somewhat stunning initial exposé. Little did we know what else would come out. Our longevity comes as both a total surprise and a pleasure (mostly!). We've seen charabancers come and go, come back again, delurk and join us for the first time. All are welcome. Threads have both filled up in a day and moved at a more stately pace. Thank you everyone for sharing your time, thoughts, opinions, experience, questions, sleuthing (there's that word!), kindness (there's that other word!) and great humour with me and with each other. As ever, as we embark on our 27th thread riding the community charabanc - this time all holding our brollies and fans aloft for much-needed shade and breeze - keep to the path, no saltiness, eat fudge and drink cider, (but not too much in the current heatwave).

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 26 IS FULL:
www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5506717-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?

What worries me is that the new version of OWH probably won't address Our Chloe's expose. I suspect that Sal's way of dealing with it is to pretend it never happened, and that no reference will be made to it at all, except possibly in an obique 'bad people, jealous of my success, tried to make up things about me and I was miserable and so I had to go into hiding. Mental health, you know...' which is going to be the excuse for the late publication of OWH. Rather than the fact that she's had to rewrite it, removing all references to the agonising over Moth's imminent death and his rapidly failing health.

I have no idea how she's going to explain his absence in the walk. Maybe he has to stay home to mind the dog? But 'I had to do a solo walk in winter (despite any sane person knowing that winter is the worst possible time to do the C2C so it was never going to be a breeze) totally solo and musing over my solo state because my walking companion had to stay home because we couldn't get a dogsitter' isn't really a headline grabber, is it?

Yes, I mean, I have no idea what kind of sleight of hand a future book, if there is one, will need to pull off. I mean is there that much handwaving in the world to get past the whole 'I am a serial thief, embezzler and forger and a chronic liar who fabricated my equally light-fingered DH's illness -- sorry, did I not mention this before?' thing?

I mean, what do you do in SW's position?

(1) Publish your unpublished book as was and ignore it all

(2) Publish your unpublished book with a new introduction in which you make cryptic reference to meanies and smear campaigns and how you'd never claimed to have told the whole story of your life in TSP, and dammit, it was your emotional truth...

(3) Rewrite your unpublished book so that it looks as if you ran away solo to walk the Coast to Coast Path to lick your wounds after the meanies were mean, only that's not going to work because that walk was all about wading through snow, and the Observer story broke in July

(4) write an entirely different book about revisiting the SWCP by yourself, using your Instragram walk and cutting and pasting in as much of the leaden purple prose about nature as possible from OWH, and just deleting the bits about snow and cold

(5) write a memoir that bears some resemblance to RL past events as CH alleges them, but which makes you and TW out to be the blameless and adorable victims of other people's suspicion: Mum gave me that money and forgot! I just made a few accounting errors at the Hemmingses! I didn't skip bail, I just needed to get away and be in nature by myself for a while because I am a Shy Woodland Creature, remember! We THOUGHT Moth was dying, definitely! It was that tight-lipped consultant's fault! We didn't lose Pen y Maes because of my criminal past, we lost it for an entirely different reason I can't talk about! Bill Cole was totally unreasonable to try to force us to accept help to make the cider he'd employed us to make! We have trust issues and can't be around strangers!

God knows.

😂 please please please do the rewrite! 🙏🏻

On Winter Hill was true surely and nothing has changed? So why would it need to be rewritten? Actually there are so many elephants in the room now it’s difficult to put the kettle on and I think Moth’s been devoured by one of them!

.

I strongly suspect that Moth is being kept out of the public eye so she can stick to the 'he's ill, he's going to die and leave me alone, I have to come to terms with being without him' line for OWH.

I mean, it's not an ACTUAL lie; Moth has some ill health - nothing that wouldn't be expected in a man of his age, but it's illness nonetheless. He IS going to die, because absolutely everyone is, and musing about life as a widow is a perfectly natural activity for any woman at all who is married. So as long as she's made it vague enough, then I can see her swinging OWH that way.

After all, if nobody ever sees him, then how can they say whether he's ill or not?

Yes, he had been mostly kept tucked away when RW was most in demand. It was the film premiere where Moth couldn't resist taking to the stage - but remember none of the journalists, even the local one in Cornwall, were allowed to ask him any questions.

One of the interviews I found the most gobsmacking was the one iirc at Waterstones, Canterbury. When RW confidently assures her captive audience that if Moth puts in a decent walk the positive effects can last him for a year, or some such. If you believe that then you believe anything ..... but I think they must have steadily dwindled.

You are most welcome 💮

Yes, the ol’ Schrödinger’s Moth debacle! 😄
I think it was a mistake to have delayed the publication of OWH because its potential to be another blockbuster for all the wrong reasons was surely at its highest? If Sal had held on to her temper instead of savagely losing it, but that’s not her way. However, delaying it gave the lawyers their chance to go through it and probably advise that if that version went out it would be a dreadful mistake. I imagine she’d continued to double down on the existing lies that were set out in the previous three books which had since been disputed. The mood of the book was a complete contrast to the happy, glowing mood of the author promoting it. That mysterious “you’ll have to wait and see!” could almost be said with a cheeky wink and is not the attitude that is portrayed on the back cover.

She's also completely lost the connection to the Wainwright 50 year anniversary and her inaccurate claim that they discussed doing the walk, in the year it was first published, when they first met (she was 10, Tim 12). What a load of cobblers!

It's just that you'd expect her to make the occasional wistful remark about lovely, dying Moth on her solo walking Instagram posts -- the poignancy of one pair of boots outside the tent where once there were two, the sadness of having enough space in the one-man tent etc.

(And, lest I sound incredibly insensitive, I'm not mocking the sadness and nostalgia of bereaved people, just people who are pre-emptively cosplaying bereavement for cash.)

Yes, the total absence of Moth is rather puzzling, isn't it? Considering that she absolutely worships the man, the fact that there isn't even the odd reference to him is strange. Maybe she wants people to think he's dead?

When a lot of people who truly believe the books must be quite concerned for his ongoing health, you'd think she'd at least want to reassure them that he's struggling on manfully, using walks to the end of the garden and back to sustain him. But it's as though he's been erased from her life altogether.

Maybe he has left her?

He won't have left her. Primarily because she's the one with the cash. But also because it's now a brand partnership as well as a romantic one. My theory about his disappearance is simply that it's less harmful to the brand for him to be out of sight, allowing RW to spin the latest segment of the tale, than for him to be out and about looking hale and hearty.

Well, wouldn't he get some of the dosh as a division of marital assets in a divorce?

I don't know UK divorce law, but wouldn't the courts potentially approach the division of marital assets of a long marriage, with a spouse past retirement age, hence no future earning potential, and in poor health (!) and no capacity for a mortgage, in order to ensure he's adequately housed and has an adequate income? Which might be quite a lump of cash, especially if 'maintaining the standard of living he'd had in the marriage was a consideration...?

Completely agree with all of you. Yes, in her writing she has been very proud of her connection with Moth. They’re not like other couples she has boasted. The romanticised version of their relationship on the page made his imminent death all the more fraught with melancholy. Melodrama, she excels at but it’s frequent and exhausting and seems to be the driving factor in all her books and the successful manipulation of everyone she has ever met. The complete absence of it now shows (if ever more proof were needed) that it never meant a thing. She ought to be mentioning Moth, presenting a united front. Perhaps he is sick of it all and refuses to engage with it any longer. Perhaps he does want a divorce, which would make her ridiculous efforts to keep his interest absolutely null and void. What irony too. However, the IG posts have put forward the idea of a team, sticking together. The four hares. But only one hare engages with the audience 🤔

Yes, thank you. I’d forgotten that detail! I don’t believe any of that early back story as she tells it now.

Just IMAGINE her having to come out and admit that he'd left her, after all the drama! I mean, all his prancing around at film premiers and having lots of young women dancing attendance on him - maybe it's turned his head?

But I don't think it's happened. If it had, then Sal would have spun it as 'he couldn't take the stress of being in the public eye any longer; it worsened his symptoms until he could barely cope and he's had to go off to a remote Scottish island to live a solitary Moth-life. It broke his heart to have to leave me, but I MUST continue my writing mission to open the public's eyes to the glories of nature!' Or she'd have centred herself as victim and made out that Moth had been poisoned against her by all the drama and she was a faultless little child of nature.

She'd have been milking it for all the sympathy she could get, basically. He's being kept indoors and told not to speak to anyone in case he admits to anything, that's all.

Well, I for one await the tabloid headlines:

MY FROLIC WITH ‘DYING’ MOTH
CORNISH THREESOMES FOR SAUCY NOT-SO-ILL WALKER
HE LOOKED JUST LIKE JASON ISAACS! REVEALS BUSTY STARLET
LIKE A MOTH TO A FLAME, I COULDN’T RESIST HIS SAICY WINK
HIS CRAVAT STOLE MY HEART

etc etc.

Maybe SW is still deciding how to spin it. Difficult to keep up the pretence that TW is quietly being well looked after on a remote Scottish island if he gets papped frolicking in a hot tub in Marbella with a reality tv star. Or gets his own gloriously indiscreet Instagram account.😃 But SW could attempt to make any divorce settlement dependent on him keeping schtum…

I’m sure this is pure fiction, but, hey, the truth is a moveable feast with the Walkers.

TW has gone from being her biggest asset to her biggest liability! The healthier he is (reported to be in fine fettle by the DM journo who door stopped the Walkers in Cornwall in June and somebody who attended a party a few months ago hosted by the chap who owns the farmhouse they rent and reported Moth to be looking hale and hearty clad in natty cravat and jacket) the more threadbare her narrative appears. Hence, maybe, why he is has been edited out of all IG posts, like some cold war Soviet leader, during the last 15 months!

Oh, I assume that's almost certainly why, but wouldn't it fit the brand better, and look more psychologically plausible, if there were occasional wistful references to him no longer walking with her, especially as many of her recent Instagram posts have been (well, purportedly) her retracing parts of the SWCP alone? It's his complete deletion I find odder.

Agree re Soviet photo retouchings -- TW should clearly watch out for anyone asking him to admire their new ice axe!

I think she's just doing a typical 'Sal' thing and trying to ignore the problem in the hopes it will go away. So if she just never refers to Moth ever again, she's hoping people will stop asking after him and will just forget he ever existed so she can continue to post 'I went on a long walk and wrote about it' stuff.

Her mindset does seem to be one of ignoring inconveniences and just trying to pretend it never happened.

Denial and avoidance. The myth of Moth.

Actually, thinking about what you’ve just said @Vroomfondleswaistcoat reminds me that Raynor and Moth are largely fictional characters and as for TSP itself… well. Yes, your last sentence nails it. She’s struggling to try and fit things back the way she wants them, she is continuously trying to control the narrative. It must be maddening for her and she cannot let go. She’s like a Stephen King protagonist.

Perhaps because she could control the narrative when she was writing the books? Everything was as she said because she said it. Now the writing has revealed to be false and so the narrative has got away from her.

Moth is an inconvenient loose end. If I were him I would be watching out very very carefully.

The alarming thing is how well this has served her!

I think this castle, that is for sale, is the one restored by Martyn Walker - he of pigeonnier fame. This one does say it needs full restoration though but it is in that area. Have a look -

13th Century Château With Historical Significance And Restoration Potential - Castle for Sale