The Salt Path As Scapegoat For All The Lies Publishing Told & Will Tell Again.

With all the lies told and sold as truth, in books, podcasts and television series during the past 15 years, Britain’s media class settled upon the mendacity of a memoirist to burn at the stake because their walking odyssey around the English coast of Cornwall was more fiction than fact.

Photo by S N Pattenden on Unsplash

People wanted to believe in the hope over adversity lie of the Salt Path just as much as they wanted to believe Captain Tom’s zimmer frame shuffle in the garden of a house valued at 2 million pounds during the darkest moments of the pandemic, represented the spirit of the Greatest Generation. No one wanted to see the Captain as a cynical manifestation of Tory to divert attention away from Boris Johnson inept Covid 19 policies that helped killing tens of thousands of pensioners. Just like no one wanted to believe that an amble around Cornwall’s coast doesn’t cure chronic life shortening diseases.

I haven’t read the Salt Path because I know that any book that writes apolitically about homelessness is about maintaining the status quo. Books like The Salt Path cater to a mediocre middle class who wants spirituality without forsaking consumerism.  However, the writer didn't need to be shamed and destroyed, unless one wants to do the same to George Orwell for Down and Out in Paris and London. Outrage should be saved for the endless political memoirs that are published each year that manipulate truth and craft fictions that are never fact checked because they are good earners for the publishing world.

The Salt Path was a book that by all accounts enthralled its readers and gave them the emotional ride they desired during their leisure moments. So as the saying goes Caveat Emptor. As long as a reader clings to neoliberalism, there can be no spirituality or political change.

When the pandemic arrived five years ago and the Before Times ended, I stopped driving my car. It didn't seem worthwhile having one. Since then, outside of visiting my oncologist in Toronto, I travel only as far as my legs will take me.

I trudge, ramble and stroll across the seasons. Winter, spring, summer, and autumn, seven days a week, I walk around 10km per day. I have walked something like 18 thousand km over those years. It's a distance many refugees from Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, or Asia undertake when they make their journeys to Western Nations in search of safety.

My walking isn't like theirs- an odyssey through dangerous lands.

Mine is a task to keep me sane and healthy. It's a way to meditate through all the noise that occurs when you are trying to survive an era when "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."

Whether I am walking or standing still, after five years of living in this evolving dystopia, I don't think too far ahead. You can't make plans for the distant future.

It is about getting safely to the next morning, week or month. There is no other way because we are living through the end stages of the 1%'s counter-revolution against the Welfare State. It's now the mopping-up phase because fascism is normalised and an acceptable form of politics.

Our suburbs and downtown cores are teeming with homeless people. It could almost be the 1930s. Except during the Great Depression, cities still had slums to contain and house the working poor and those on minuscule pensions. In the USA, almost 50% of the homeless are employed full-time. In Canada and the UK, food banks are used by many who work full-time but can't make ends meet.

In 2025, what were once working-class districts became gentrified assets rented out by corporations or affluent boomers. Today's homeless are jetsam from a Welfare State scuttled by politicians on the orders of the 1%.

Ancient Rome invented Bread & Circuses to maintain order in an Empire composed of slaves and an impoverished workforce. But 21st-century neoliberalism said to hell with Bread for the poor because intolerance is a cheaper diversion.

That is how the world became saddled with Trump. He is neoliberalism's circus and Emperor. Nero for our digital, reality TV age.

Unlike his first Presidency, there is an efficiency to Trump's chaos in this second term. It is directed and purposed not just with evil but with an ambition to wrest society from the many and return it to the few forevermore.

I am tired of those who say, Trump is all talk because Hitler was full of talk too, until one day he wasn't. Joe Biden helped put to rest the concept of a rules-based International World Order, and Trump is taking full advantage of that for his ambitions of autocracy and kleptocracy.

But the last people we can trust or hope will save us are the media class because they used all the outrage for the writer of an unimportant book that should have been used against their peers and themselves for covering up Israel's genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.

Your support keeps me housed and allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. Your subscriptions are crucial to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other comorbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost-of-living crisis times. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it is all good too because we are in the same boat.

For the last 18 months, I've pieced together my Dad's Green and Pleasant Land, which was unfinished at the time of his death. It's done apart for some minor adjustments that are required. It covers his life from 1923 to July 1945 concluding with Labour winning the General election. In beta form this portion of his last work is finished. For those who have asked a copy of this book will be sent to them in the next few weeks. After some minor tweaking of the manuscript I will begin to send off the manuscript to publishers and hope they see the importance of this work.