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?

Honestly, @Peladon, don’t let SW loom too large as a lens on other people in general, or memoir-writers specifically! Just as most people don’t steal large amounts from their employers, their elderly mothers and their PILs, or pretend their workshy spouse has a terminal diagnosis to winkle out of trouble, far less pretend to have walked a long-distance path or cosplay homelessness, most memoir writers will do no more than compress timelines or change names or identifying details.

I have a close friend I’ve known for 30 years who has written two memoirs as well as many novels, and one memoir dealt with a year living overseas. I visited her and everything was as she described it, and two trips we took while I was there were exactly as related in the published text, bar I asked her to omit me. Her older child also asked to be cut, so you’d think she was a parent to one. Everything else was accurate.

While I only met her as a student, everything about the other memoir reflects her early life, family, experiences etc, as I’ve encountered them in RL on visits or heard about them since I met her in the nineties, bar names or things omitted or altered for the privacy of others (on legal advice from her publishers).

I genuinely think that reflects the norm for memoir writers more than SW’s compulsive untruths. Don’t let her sour you on the human race.

Yes indeed. And under most circumstances, with very few exceptions, it's a criminal offence to become a charity trustee or a company director under a name that is not your legal name, because it means you can't be checked for eligibility for the role against the Charity Commission and Companies House regulated lists of disqualifying factors.

As well as completing a 'declaration of eligibility', charities like Emmaus that work with vulnerable people may also require their trustees to have a DBS check - which again can't be carried out if someone is not using their legal name. Additionally, I'm not clear whether SW's arrangements with creditors ever involved a formal insolvency agreement, but if so, that would have disqualified her from one or other of a trustee or director role.

For her to have become a charity trustee/company director as Raynor Winn, it must mean that she must have signed paperwork as RW, and actively deceived the rest of the Emmaus directors about her real name. She appears to have faced no consequences for this. It's one of the aspects of her deception that I feel strongly about; charity trusteeships these days are highly regulated and for good reason, including to protect sometimes vulnerable service users.

I saw a copy of TSP in a charity shop yesterday, it was the film tie in edition with Streep and Isaacs on the cover. Needless to say I did not buy it.

Did the daily mail share the map @ThompsonTwin ? If not I am not really sure it's ok to share it? It feels a bit stalky. Much as I loathe their lying I don't think people should stoop to stalking and harassment

Agree. This was awful behaviour, it wasn't a harmless deceit

I'm still baffled by how they could have kept such a low profile while they lived in Polruan. They got Monty in Feb 2017 and moved to Haye Farm in Jan 2019. So they must have been out walking Monty every day for almost 2 years. How on earth didn't they bump into people in Polruan on a regular basis?

I already knew Polruan and, having been recently to the pub in their street, this baffled me. I was actually poring over the map as I thought there must be a gate in the wall at the back of The Old Chapel. There is no space for cars at the front so if they kept their car at the back, or in the local car park, they may have come and gone from there. I don't think they read very much .... or walk very far!

I have a reactive dog and tend to walk her when there's nobody about. I wonder if they did this, took Monty out when it was dark? Does the chapel have a garden too, because I know quite a lot of people who think small dogs don't need much walking and will just 'pop them in the garden' instead of taking them for a proper walk (laughs hollowly as the owner of a five mile a day Patterdale...)

I suppose it would have sounded less saintly and adorable if SW had specified that they adopted a rescue dog so reactive he couldn’t be walked around other dogs, ever! Though equally you’d have said SW would love to depict herself as walking solitary at dawn and dusk, having adopted a dog equally uneasy at being around others, in fact the perfect dog for a Shy Woodland Creature.

Difficult to be a Shy Woodland Creature if you're dragging a reluctant terrier around the streets in the dark. Better if you're actually letting him off lead to run wild through local woodland (and vanish into the darkness for three hours while you run round banging a tin with a spoon and yelling his name, while he chases squirrels three miles away).

That sounds as if it comes from a Place of Deep Authenticity .😃 I used to walk a friend’s reactive dachshund daily and even though it’s almost three years since he moved away, I still sometimes find myself checking the street ahead for approaching dogs so I can cross over. He had the true dachshund inability to correctly judge comparative size and, if I dropped out for a minute to say hello to a friend, he’d be trying to leap at a German Shepherd he thought was looking at him funny, and that he knew he could definitely teach a lesson to.

I miss him!

But I haven’t entirely given up on my private theory that Monty was hired from canine central casting for the purposes of adding to the cute and the adorable irony of two purported long-distance walkers rescuing a dog who can’t walk far.

Was out all day yesterday and didn’t read all of yesterday’s posts until late! Thank you @ThompsonTwin for taking the time to set out that brilliant post, it was an enjoyable read and gratefully received. I need to bookmark that. I really appreciate the list of fact and fiction set out in such a manner. It must have taken you ages. The dates and all the lies they’ve told in interviews and the books are difficult for me to process.
The Polruan time period is very difficult for me to understand. I have only read TWS once. She writes a lot about hiding, not wanting to be social (ha! I wonder why????). I’ve opened it at random and landed in chapter Antimatter. She’s describing a huge pile of job rejections and being at a small gathering of neighbours where one says ‘Oh wow. Gill….. you didn’t tell me Ray was a writer.’
’ All the heads in the room turned towards my dark corner by the curtain. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck.’
quote from TWS by “Raynor Winn”.

I think you make a strong point here and I agree with you because what you say is Penguin has destroyed my trust in non-fiction.

However, I don't find it depressing - I find it encouraging. It would be great to have much better authors and books made available. I hope there will be more healthy questioning of authors, agents, publishers especially where 'miracles' are concerned. It would be brilliant to have fewer sycophantic interviewers. If the husband isn't allowed to be asked a question - then let's not have a video or photos of him, that would be fine.

A clue maybe: when there is a terminal illness, you lose your house through no fault of your own, you have barely any money, you walk a 630 mile trail - all of it, your mother has died recently, your dear sheep dies .... intensified by hating on many other people and constant humble bragging. Topped off by having a particularly innate and special relationship to nature as confirmed by ladybirds, peregrines, dolphins coming over to swim with you, etc.

I found the Australian contribution on TSP very welcome throughout this past year. They have had some shockers over there as outlined in the article below. It is fair though and teachers on writing courses seem to feel there are honest stories to share:

The Salt Path Controversy: When Bestselling Memoirs Bend the Truth

The anecdote in TWS about someone in Polruan being wowed when they realised that Ray was a writer seems almost certain to be yet another of Sal's fabrications. The few people in Polruan (like Tom Barrie Simmons) who knew them, called them Sally and Timothy!

During their sojourn, we got to know them, and I was rather surprised to hear a woman being interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 one morning, whose voice I recognised and whose story seemed familiar.
She was introduced as Raynor Wynn, but that was not the name she bore when she arrived in our village. When we met them, they were Sally And Timothy. However, later on we called her Rain and Wind.

I'm not not an expert, but I'm convinced that (as their nephew James claimed on LI), Sal and Tim are pathological liars - Pseudologia Fantastica.

Apparently there is no cure!

The Psychological Diagnosis for People Who Lie About Everything

But SW and TW’s lies are carefully calculated to gain something, to enable or cover up stealing, to avoid the legal consequences of stealing, to put forward a more palatable (and marketable) version of themselves, to avoid doing something they don’t want to do. I mean, they may of course also do other kinds of lying (all that TW stuff about playing for whichever football team it was, shepherding with cats etc sounds like classic ‘I’m faking my own past to sound more interesting’ lies), but it generally seems to me far too calculated to be just people who automatically lie about what they ate for lunch.

I do indeed have a Dreadful Dog.

But as Monty seems to drop in and out of mention and their lives don't seem to be overly affected by a 'dog that can't walk far' I do find myself wondering whether he actually belongs to their son and is just wheeled out for photo opportunities? I know that owning Dreadful Dog curtails my ability to go jetting off to distant locations and ligging around on red carpets and at big publishing parties...

That's true but there is an awful lot of what seems to me like pathological lying in TSP which doesn't really gain them anything other than making the story even more incredible.

Take the case of being mistaken for SA. Instead of this happening say once ( in the library at Combe Martin), it happens a further 4 times! At Grant's, at the stile gate near St Ives, on the beach somewhere and at Port Isaac. If that wasn't enough, in LL Sal goes on to claim that while they were on the walk people were literally falling over themselves to come out of their houses and offer them cakes and pies, being under the misapprehension that Moth was SA!

I wonder if there are any records of people locally saying that they thought they'd met Simon Armitage but later realised that they'd been wrong? Because rushing out to press food on someone and then subsequently finding out it had been the wrong person (and maybe even saying that they'd found out it was a character in a non-fiction book!) is the sort of story that would normally be told among families for the 'aren't I daft?' laughs.

I think the lies in TSP etc can be explained simply if one imagines that Salray wrote it (with the team) as a fiction based on some cobbled together truths. It is why there is usually a seed of truth in what it written. But stiched together as a tapestry it is far from the truth. It is a fiction repackaged as a true story. One can imagine her and Tim (and Alice) coming up with ideas to make the story better. The sole intent was to write a compelling story with hope of it being enough of a success to get some money. But they actually hit the bestseller jackpot.

I doubt it! I did know of somebody who lived Calstock on the SWCP who knew when SA was passing through and waited for him. Those who cared enough about SA knew what he looked like, so the thought of them mistaking SA for Moth is laughable imo. As is the idea of a crowd of people in St Ives clapping Moth after his Beowulf poetry reading because they were all aware that the reading was a translation by Seamus Heaney who had recently died!

You may well be right. Tim is a born story teller so he may have provided a lot of the input. Walking with a tortoise seems as likely as herding sheep with cats in Ecuador!

Isn't it all of the above posts! One of my main reasons for always being a sceptic, about TSP, was that I have known people similar to this - but two of them! This is what has perplexed me and one of the the things that has kept me interested - I mean, how does that work?

Surely, SW is the more calculated, distant, weighing things up for gain type of liar. And as for TW, well he is the more engaging, people friendly, random loose cannon. Which is why he has had the debilitating condition, been kept out of the way, not allowed to be interviewed, etc.

I know there are journalistic errors but the Sal originally came from ... botany degree ... real name is Ray ... things are probably Tim departing from his brief. Whereas Sal became more and more experienced and most interviewers made it a cinch for her. Long live Cornesie (remember the Australian, again, radio interviewer)!

That description gels with the impression they gave to somebody called Boots Coffey who met them on a few occasions in Polruan.