I don’t know about you, but I’ve had one of those weeks which feels like taking 2 steps forward and 1 step back. It all began with Raynor Winn.
The Salt Path author was supposed to make a rare in-person appearance on Thursday at a NOON/Tech Pixies private event in Oxford. I was going to interview her before we all watched a screening of The Salt Path film. The event had been months in the planning but last Sunday the story broke in The Observer challenging much of Raynor Winn’s story. As a result, she cancelled all her engagements, including a SaltLines tour of the Southwest … and our event in Oxford. (The Observer has published another piece today featuring an interview with a man who rented his cider farm to the couple and says he felt “gaslit” by them.)
What I think about the Raynor Winn controversy
I have to say, I was personally saddened by the allegations against Raynor Winn made by The Observer. She was one of the very first people we interviewed when I set up NOON. (You can read the original piece here – with a new intro that talks through the controversy.)
Back then she was relatively unknown, nothing like the phenomenon she became. I’ve always thought her tale of midlife redemption through walking – literally taking it one step at a time and going back to basics to make it through a rough patch – really chimed with our mission.
The journalistic perspective
However, as a journalist and editor of three decades, I also know how much evidence The Observer must have had to run the story. I’ve got the scars on my back from so many articles over the years which could not run for legal reasons because we didn’t have enough proof to back up what we wanted to say – even if we knew it was true. So I was looking forward to putting The Observer story to Raynor Winn and hearing her answers.
Unfortunately her agent told us that because “this is now all in the hands of the lawyers”, she couldn’t come and speak as planned. Then midweek she posted on her website firmly rebutting the Observer’s claims that her husband Moth wasn’t as ill as claimed. She says this was the most hurtful allegation.
The medical documents she posted make it clear that he does have the condition as she describes. More murky is her conduct. In her statement, she admits to having made “mistakes” when it came to her alleged embezzlement of around £65,000 from a former employer (the repaying of which ultimately caused the couple to lose their house, which was why they set off on the walk…).
So…where does this leave Raynor Winn in the public eye?
Well, if the reactions we’ve been receiving from all of you are anything to go by, it’s all a bit tarnished. The problem with writing a warts-and-all memoir, and being an icon for midlife resilience and reinvention, is if your amazing “true” story turns out to be maybe not quite as billed, then readers feel salty.
Many of you wrote to us explaining how you gave her book to everyone you knew and felt so buoyed by it and now feel let down that perhaps Raynor/Sally wasn’t the innocent victim of circumstances that she seemed….
I admit – as an escapee from the media machine – there is a bigger pattern here. The UK media loves nothing more than building people up and then knocking them down. But there is also a level of fame where suddenly everything becomes more scrutinised, and Raynor Winn has hit that (all of this has been on the BBC TV news – a sure sign that it is huge).
I can understand it a bit from Raynor’s point of view. She wrote The Salt Path not knowing if it would even be published, let alone thinking about what would happen if it became a bestseller and a movie and all its claims were interrogated by an investigative journalist.
But then again, the “mistakes” she references in her rebuttal were a ticking time bomb as the book and movie got more high profile.
My family has been scrutinised by the media
On a human level, I feel very sorry for Raynor and Moth – my own family have been in the centre of this kind of media storm in the past. It’s a very lonely and weirdly silent place to be. I remember the whole of the press pack being camped outside our front door, filming everyone who came in and out.
It’s weird to see those you love leading the news agenda and hearing it over and over again on the BBC headlines while you sit at home, glued to mobile phones watching the developments in a kind of eerie silence, the strange stillness in the eye of the storm. I do remember the way it felt – horrible! Anxiety levels for everyone sky high, lots of tears. You really find out who your friends are (and they are never who you think).
Here at NOON we try and stay close to the action – it’s in my inky blood – but to be honest I’d rather this week that it was less close! It’s been quite tricky reorganising the event at such short notice (which was benefiting Crisis, the homeless charity).
But all’s well that ends well. We were able to rearrange the event and screened the wonderful Pamela Anderson movie The Last Showgirl instead. It’s another great movie (which had a very limited release) starring fab Queenagers (Anderson and Jamie Lee Curtis) and directed by a woman, Gia Coppola.
We so need these female takes on the world. Otherwise we are doomed to be judged by the male lens, which isn’t very interested in women, especially older women. The world needs us women of a certain age – as we were reminded by the ghastly Greg Wallace bleating on about how he has done nothing wrong, despite 50 women now coming out to say how he was sexually inappropriate. (It was something that was first called out by Queenagers.)
My day with goosegogs
In the midst of all this, I found myself doing some relaxation cooking. A dear pal has a glut of gooseberries and she dropped off a punnet full.
I sat at the table hulling them with my thumbnail, like I used to do with my late granny. I boiled them with sugar and mashed them through an old fashioned metal sieve to create a seed-free greeny/brown puree.
Then I made custard, measuring out the funny pinky/yellow powder with sugar and stirring it into the milk. I mixed my gooseberry puree into the yellow custard and whisked it with a good dollop of mascarpone. It looked unprepossessing but tasted delicious.
There was something weirdly soothing about making gooseberry fool. Yes, I felt a bit like a 1950s housewife – it is surprisingly labour-intensive for a quite unremarkable pudding.
But I also felt a direct line to all the matriarchs in my family. As a child, I would hull berries, stir custard, mash the gooseberries. The sweet/bitter taste is like a time machine to working in my granny’s kitchen or sitting with my mum in the garden in the Cotswolds. I served my fool in the bowls that I inherited from my granny, the very fish-embossed bowls from Spain that she used to serve it in.
Making, sharing and eating delicious old family recipes is often one of the most instinctual and accessible ways to enact simple rituals that connect to people we have lost, especially those who literally fed us through our childhood. It’s as if this fool actually has that love stirred in, their and my experiences blended – a kind of endless and timeless present. It connects us in a small way to the eternal.
Remember the duck disaster?
My other moments of calm and connection came, as always, in the pond, where there is an invasion of ducks. I know I wrote earlier this year about duck-ageddon, when the heron munched the ducklings. But we’ve now had a whole new crop.
I counted 14 ducklings this week: the dearest, fluffiest, sweetest tiny balls of life imaginable. Lying on my back wallowing and looking at the clouds shape-shifting, weightless and surrounded by green, my mind goes still.
And as if in recognition of that moment of calm … whizzzz … a turquoise kingfisher, like a blessing.
And as if that wasn’t treat enough, on my next lap … whizzzzz… another one!
And if that wasn’t enough, while watching my brothers playing cricket later, suddenly a huge, full rainbow appeared. It was so solid that my baby niece insisted we find the end of it. She didn’t like it when I told her that by the time we got to the end it would be gone. (Sometimes the truth hurts. 😄)
Redefining midlife: 3 inspiring interviews
Lots of you have been very kind about the interview I did with Emma Bridgewater in The Telegraph last week, in which she talks about never retiring, how to have an amicable divorce (it’s bloody hard but you have to keep trying) and being a female entrepreneur (and how her dad always tried to make out that he was behind her success – not true).
And as I mentioned last week, I also recently interviewed Jo Wood for The Independent. She is great on why Ozempic is a terrible idea for midlife women.
I’ve also written recently about how Victoria Starmer is striking a blow for women by refusing to be part of a usual Buy-One-Get-One-Free set-up in Downing Street.
I’m interviewing Cally Beaton – of Namaste Motherf*ckers Podcast at AllBright on Tuesday (free for NOON Members, here is the link).
And there is still one more space for Wasing, on 18 July (go on, you know you want to). Psst: If you come along, I’ll give a little more dish about the ladies I’ve been interviewing lately! 😉
Love,
Eleanor
