The Salt Path not taken?

And would it matter if it wasn't?

The news split my wife’s book group, and the WhatsApp exchange became testy. The division was caused by revelations in the Observer that the original predicament of Raynor Winn, author of the “journey-to-find-ourselves” bestseller The Salt Path – expulsion from an Edenic cottage - had not been caused by a false friend mis-investing her hard-earned dosh, but instead had its root in her embezzling as much as £64,000 from an employer who had trusted her, and - when discovered - borrowing thousands to pay some of it back and then not having the money to repay the loan.

One faction in the group was clear that the person to blame for the furore was Chloe Hadjimatheou, the journalist who had investigated Winn (real name Sally Walker). Their objection can be summarised as: doesn’t everybody make mistakes, wasn’t this just character assassination and aren’t journalists an untrustworthy lot? (A coda here: I have worked alongside Chloe at both the BBC and Tortoise Media and she is a highly trustworthy lot.) The other faction felt almost personally betrayed by Winn. The argument continues, but what was clear was that much had been invested in the book by its readers.

Getting on track

Until last week I’d never heard of The Salt Path. This isn’t so surprising because, as Richard Osman pointed out when discussing the controversy last week, most people have never heard of almost all books. And this one had passed me by.

Even if it hadn’t I wouldn’t have read it. Long before its publication in 2018 I had grown tired of people finding themselves on journeys. Or anywhere really, but journeys are the worst. I watched the movie version of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail and liked it, but mostly because its starred Reese Witherspoon who I’d watch in anything. Had I been up for a self-discovery book in 2018, the year the Path was published, I think I’d have gone for Laine B. Brown’s Finding Myself in Puglia: A Journey of Self-Discovery Under the Warm Southern Italian Sun. “She knew no one and yet she had surety in her resolve”, reads the publisher’s blurb on Amazon. “She wanted to feel fully present in feeling unsafe and comfortable with the not knowing. And so the journey began…” And, for me last least, ended. I am not a sucker for redemptive arcs.

Ah, says the sharp-witted and incredibly well-informed reader, but wasn’t your own first book Paddling to Jerusalem (think Blake not Netanyahu) a very much less successful journey of discovery through England?

Yes, but not self-discovery. After three months travelling 1500 or so miles in a kayak and on foot down rivers and canals of England I had discovered only a dislike of Canada Geese, a fear of swans, a wariness of anglers and been reminded of my own obstinacy.

The book is available free from all good garden walls outside houses whose occupants are moving; claim your copy quickly before it rains. And it was about discovering England at the turn of the millennium but doing it by water. In the event I was trumped by Roger Deakin who swam it.

My trip was uncomfortable, lonely and challenging. I had to parlay almost any random encounter into a meaningful exchange. Mostly everyone I met was lovely, which from a writer’s point of view is hopeless. When the woman on the next table poured a full glass of red wine over her rather seedy looking husband’s head in a restaurant beside the Trent, I could have kissed her.

“Funny” and “Aaronovitch is good company” were among my best reviews. Whereas The Salt Path garnered these:

A beautiful, thoughtful, lyrical story of homelessness, human strength and endurance' Guardian

'A tale of triumph: of hope over despair; of love over everything'- Sunday Times

'Mesmerising. It is one of the most uplifting, inspiring books that I've ever read' - i-paper

'The most inspirational book of this year' - The Times

'Luminescent. A literary phenomenon' - Mail on Sunday

This last week I read it. I noted its over-serendipitous beginning. In 2013, on the day after losing the court case for the possession of their home Raynor and “Moth” Winn (aka Sally and Timothy Walker) get the news that his various aches and pains are caused by a neurodegenerative disease (CBD) which, at best, confers a lifespan of less than a decade. Days later, as the bailiffs are literally banging on their door, Raynor happens upon the guidebook to the South West coastal path and decides then and there that she and her terminally ill husband should walk its full nearly 700 mile length. With no money at all and being homeless (by choice, really) they will “wild camp”.