The Sincere Path

Wimbledon, a recipe for green sauce and the furore around THAT book

I don’t usually write this early in the week. I generally wait for something vaguely interesting to happen, or to have a sudden flash of memory that I am keen to share, or a thought is triggered which leads me here. Occasionally I have stuff to get off my chest and this is one of those times.

Let’s start with tennis. I don’t like it. There I have said it and in Wimbledon season too. Fighting talk. I wouldn’t mind playing it occasionally if I didn’t have RSI from all my tippy tappy typing, but I will not sit, trotters up (thanks forever Danny Dyer) in front of the TV to watch it.

I was once invited by a BBC pal to go as their guest and was honest about my intentions on accepting based entirely on the hospitality tent, although I think they thought I was joking because who wouldn’t want to watch the tennis? I said I didn’t, and they should give the ticket to someone who did, but they laughed heartily and told me about the free champagne, so I went. I very much enjoyed the poached salmon swimming through a sea of cucumber slices, the bowl of strawberries so luscious they looked polished and the celebrity spotting. Then my heart sank.

I was ushered over to the men’s semi-finals match, where I sat, hot and bothered, thinking of my unfinished glass of champagne abandoned on the bar. I tried to be interested. Then I did some crowd watching. Then I did some clock watching because the game was interminable, and I started panicking about missing my train. I can’t tell you which players I saw that day, it was twenty years ago, I just knew my first Wimbledon would be my last.

Ever since, I have felt it was shaming to admit this, but in the interests of full disclosure, a bit of a theme in this week’s newsletter, I shout it out across the Substack landscape and hope John McEnroe doesn’t have time to read this.

So, moving on to my next point.

A couple of years ago, as the proposal for my book was landing on publisher’s desks, a couple of editors responded wondering whether it could be the next The Salt Path. I knew the book by Raynor Winn – it’s a non-fiction phenomenon - but I hadn’t read it, or its sequels, and I felt I should, if I was being compared in some way. And while there were similarities with a woman writing about a husband’s battle, a journey they shared and a good dose of nature writing, there was a lot that wasn’t the same. What I did take away from it was how telling a difficult story not only benefits the writer but may land in the hands of others who need to hear it, and it might help. I hoped in some small way the same would happen with mine and gratefully it has, albeit not to the tune of 2 million sales!

Now it is alleged that significant elements of Raynor and Moth Winn’s inspirational tale are not true. Including their names, financial motivations and the medical diagnosis, as uncovered and debated by a robust investigative piece in The Observer. Some doubt whether they even walked the coastal path. I cannot believe that didn’t happen, but then I am hanging on to a thread of hope that there has been some terrible misunderstanding. Questions have been raised and everyone waits for answers.

Writing real life is complicated. It requires absolute honesty in the things a writer chooses to put on the page. It doesn’t mean they have to give a warts and all account, but what they share through memoir has to be true. And in what they leave out it cannot, by omission, cast something in a good light or direct the reader’s thoughts in a disingenuous direction.

The currency for truth is at an all-time global low so there is a reassurance in the outrage which has come from the Salt Path revelations. While the reverberations echo within the publishing industry and writers like me gather around the Substack water cooler, edits temporarily abandoned, the majority of the reading public may have no idea this has even happened. And yet, everything I read talks of disappointment, feeling let down, swindled out of money and reading time for something that now appears to rest on dodgy foundations. The Memoirists shake their fists at the genre being called into disrepute. The Cynical question whether the idea for the book came before the walk, rather than the other way around. The Gobsmacked say that if the illness is not proved to be real then this is the most irresponsible and reprehensible of all the lies, because other people have read these books and hoped that walking may be a miracle cure.

Whatever your thoughts, and I have had a lot, all crowding into each other and jostling for position, we may not know the truth even if we are told it, because it will now be hard to trust that it comes from a place of sincerity. As the writer and comedian Jenny Éclair says we may have to take it with ‘a pinch of Salt Path’.

And for my final annoyance of the week so far (and jeez, it’s only Tuesday), another impending heatwave. Sorry. I know it is better to complain about the tennis (unforgivable), than the hot weather (prisonable offence). I really like summer and am happy for temperatures to remain in the very low 20s but any higher and my brain goes as frizzy as my hair.

Therefore I am dreading the kitchen this week. So I have made green sauce, otherwise known as Salsa Verde. This is my answer to cooking in the heat which is to avoid cooking as much as possible. Instead, I have knocked up a large jam jar’s worth of sauce ready to trickle over roasted veg (OK yes the oven will be on briefly) and couscous, add to ciabatta stuffed with mozzarella, salami and lettuce, perfect for pepping up a tomato salad, boosting a roast chicken and there may even be enough left to dip BBQ sausages into. I know you don’t need a recipe because you probably make it already, in which case this is your seasonal reminder. Plus, it’s all over the internet but here is my chuck it in version…

A bunch of fresh parsley

A bunch of basil

A couple of tablespoons of capers

A clove of garlic (you can do two, but I don’t want it to overpower)

A few anchovies

A 150ml glug of olive oil

A tablespoon of white wine vinegar or lemon squeezed

Optional:

A few mint leaves if you fancy it or a handful of tarragon

Teaspoon ish of mustard

Olives (this turns it into more of a tapenade so I tend not to)

Blitz it all in a food processor and pour into a clean, sterilised jam jar. Store in the fridge. Don’t thank me, thank the damned summer.