Grifters

Thoughts on the Salt Path ‘Controversy'

Grifters

I was drinking cocktails with Anna Wharton the other evening over zoom, a woman whose company I enjoy immensely, and she asked me what I thought of the Salt Path controversy. To be honest I hadn’t really formed an opinion and waffled a little bit. Opinions are like arseholes, everybody has one, and they are rarely fragrant. But I got to thinking, subconsciously really, I didn’t put much rigour into it.

I have met the author at a book festival we were both speaking at. As an obviously working class man one develops a very quick instinct into the discomfort many middle class people feel when they find themselves subjected to the company of the lower orders. I felt it as a gardener, I certainly felt it when I was homeless and I feel it sometimes at literary events which are often dominated by comfortable middle class people, (Oxford was a nightmare!) So much so that I rarely do events any more. The feeling came off her in waves, but we cannot help what we are or how we were brought up and educated. Nevertheless I decided not to read the book, we did not jell.

When the story broke about her partners illness - real or fictional, her allegedly fraudulent business activities, the fact that she appears to somehow have been able to lay her hands on a big wad of cash to pay somebody off and stay out of court, her apparently completely fictional homelessness I was asked how I felt, having been a person who was genuinely homeless (I didn’t even have a pen to write a book with let alone a tent to sleep in or a caravan in France). At first I felt sorry for her. As writers we are all grifters. Some of us have to be.