Raynor Winn (2018) The Salt Path

A writer’s job is simple as Satan testing Job. Take everything away and have the protagonist curse god (and die). Nobody much likes happy endings in The Bible or good books generally unless there’s been boils, blood, sweat and tears. Even then, somebody is going to get crucified.

Tick list. Ray loses her home. Her husband, Moth has been casually told the good news from a medical specialist that they’ve identified his illness. A terminal, neurodegenerative disease, Corticobasal Degeneration. It’s a bit like Parkinson’s. Nobody walks away from it.

Homeless and with her husband dying,  Ray and Moth decide to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path because they had literally nowhere else to go. Their budget is under £50 a week. They’ll live in a tent, camp wild (increasingly difficult). The journey outward will be matched by the journey inward. A love story in which their benediction is to be ‘Salted’ by the Salt Path and the land through which they travel will become their metaphorical and real home.

There is a small market for travelogues. Imagine for a moment, a woman over fifty plonked down on your desk, or more likely sent you an email with a Word.doc attachment. She asked you to read it. Would you?

The answer is no—if you’re in the publishing field you’d get around 300 or more requests like that a week. More if a top-five publisher. It used to be called the slush pile. Here’s where myths are made. Writers scribbling in an attic. The kind where Harry Potter emerges from a throwaway book written in a café by a poor author.

If an agent is pushing it and if you have a working relationship the answer becomes maybe. Maybe a junior member of the team will have a look at it and decide if someone higher up the food chain will read part of it.

Books written by first-time and unknown authors don’t sell is equally as true as Jane Austin’s dictum in Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

Ironically, it’s women (and their more sensible mothers, their social agents) who are searching for a wealthy husband, in the same way that naïve first-time authors seek their fortune from a top-five publishing firm.

Without Pride and Without Prejudice the odds of a first-time author selling over two-million copies of their book and having a film based on their book are, I’d guess commensurate. Over 2 000 000/1. Possibly much higher.  No Mr Darcy galloping up with his billions is likely to appear any time soon.   

Homeless and impoverished, Ray and Moth were invisible. Outcast. When her friend offered a room on her farm for as long as they needed, they became free labour. A cuckoo in someone else’s nest. When she became a best-selling author, the backlash was inevitable.

The extent of their impoverishment was questioned. They’d more money than she was saying. Stealing food and sneaking away from campsites without paying were not the necessities or the choices many homeless face, but more sinister. Cheating the reader.

Ray doesn’t explain Moth’s renewed ability to regain his strength and walk. Even make love. Miracles are fodder for conspiracy theorists, because, ironically, it’s the medical profession that kills us angle. Following the 2025 exposé, the charity PSPA (which supports CBD patients) cut ties with Ray and Moth. The film adaption with Gillian Anderson playing Ray (which I’ve not seen) had to add a ‘fictionalised disclaimer’.  We see them all the time. Something like, ‘this film is based on true events which we just made up’. Fact or fiction, it’s entertaining. That’s what matters. Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6