I am wondering now if Raynor and Moth had cash with them on their walk

[Maura555]

They borrowed more than the very large debt they owed for her embezzlement. I now wonder if they were carrying cash with them on their very long hike. Knowing her background story, I believe she would always have access to money on these walks.

If they didn’t do the walk I wonder what actually happened.

One thing interested me in one of the many articles about these two, is that apparently the cider farm in Cornwall, where they now live, is not theirs, but they were given it to look after by a fan of the book. I wonder if they will find themselves homeless again soon?

I actually liked the book but I'm fairly surprised that people were reading it thinking it was the gospel truth! I knew it was billed as non-fiction but that's a fairly flexible category and I always assumed it was a very cleaned-up/romanticised version of events anyway. Actually I tend to think this of pretty much every book like that. Things happen in inconvenient orders, you merge various people into more interesting characters, places get elided together...it's standard practice. The same with documentary.

I mean, these guys are clearly grifters. But it wouldn't surprise me at all to find the vast majority of memoirs and such like contain an hefty amount of invention. And always have done!

Can you get those if you are homeless?

Yes, they were interviewed there by Rick Stein.

I wasn't wild about the book. I was far more interested in the vague/brief details of the court case at the beginning. I didn't hate it but the walking bits became a bit tedious and she seemed a bit annoying for the reasons other posters have mentioned.

Overall I found it quite frustrating and kept thinking but WHY are you doing this. But I'm the sort of person who doesn't understand why people do gruelling and dangerous stuff like climb Everest just because it's there etc.

The real story, so it turns out, is much more interesting. It's a shame the film has already been made as an expose version of the true story would be much more engaging (for me anyway). I suspect they didn't actually do the whole walk, just dipped in and out of a few sections with some comfortable interludes a bit like Jimmy Savile "running" the London Marathon.

I saw it, I thought they came across as very odd, but I had assumed they had bought the place with the money they made from the book sales.

Apparently so. Can use a ' care of ' address such as a family member or friend. No idea how they did it.

No they were offered the farm opportunity by someone who read the book. I recall reading about it somewhere.

Interesting

They were foolish. If they had put ‘loosely based on real life events’ or something similar we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

I know! That’s what I said in my post at 14.14!

I only heard this yesterday though.

It was an item on the news but I just missed it. Anyone see it?

I am wondering now if Raynor and Moth had cash with them on their walk
One thing that I never understood: they were living hand-to-mouth, relying on the tax credits, counting the days until it landed in their bank account but ...

Several times they said that their bank balance was short. I assumed that it was bank charges or something like that. But they never questioned it, never raised it in the branch. Wouldn't you, if you were that skint?

I really enjoyed the book. Lots of people did, otherwise it would not have been a best seller! The part that rang most untrue was the diet of cheap noodles. With his illness it seemed both implausible and irresponsible. The farm being provided by a fan is covered in the second book, which was not as good and I don't think I finished it. In the second book Moth does a degree course which also seemed ridiculous given that his condition should have been neurodegenerate. Another reason i lost interest and gave up on it. But i loved the first book despite it all, it was positive and hopeful, so it's very disappointing to have that shattered.

Update on the donated house, they fell out with the benefactor.

mol.im/a/14890227

Well quite. It’s easy for everyone now to say that they didn’t but it sold avd sold and sold. Lots of those purchase LO’s would have been through recommendations from people who had read and enjoyed the book.

I haven’t read the book but I don’t get why this walk was supposedly such a big deal, I lived near the path for ages and there are tonnes of people walking the whole path every year, mainly newly retired German teachers from what I recall 😁

A lot more obviously do it in instalments but eventually complete the whole thing.

Because Moth was supposedly terminally ill and they were destitute .

No way people that shameless went without food or suffered. Grifters.

more will come out

To be honest, I'm amazed they found enough room to hike. They must have found one of the few parts of the UK that isn't covered in new build hobbit homes.

Same same!! I couldn’t get past the first few pages, the way she was moaning you’d think she was in a war zone. Smelled the bullshit from a mile off.

Exactly this. I read someone's take on comparing it to the James Heriot Books which apparently were written as stories in the third person and were chamged into first person "memoirs" by the original publisher. Things not happening exactly as the books suggested and no one ever seems to have cared - although there was no embezzlement.

I think many people enjoyed the book and took most of it at face value, but it was clear that a lot of readers were sceptical too.

I said on another thread that I don't think they are necessarily bad people but they come across as amoral, rather than bad.

DH has a friend just like this. He doesn't set out to do bad or wrong things, but he doesn't lose any sleep if sometimes that's how it pans out. He was always brilliant at setting up businesses, worked hard at them, very creative thinker about how to sell the business - but tragically, hopelessly useless with money. Many people lost money, including friends, investing in him. A business would fail and he would just do a runner leaving everyone else to take the hit.

People like this tend to despise their sensible, boring friends who settle down with marriage, and kids when younger, and get all mealy mouthed when, forty years later, their friends are quite comfortably off and they have nothing.

These remind me strongly of this friend

I think it's pretty 'bad' to embezzel 64k from an employer who has cancer.