The Adventure of the Packham Encounter

In which I recall a celebrity experience...

I've previously written here about my celebrity encounters including accidentally giving celebrity gardener Alan Titchmarsh a pen and bumping elbows with the Archbishop of Canterbury. But there was one celebrity encounter which wasn't awkward at all and turned out to be really inspiring. 

I was about eleven or twelve I think and most weeks a magazine or newsletter would arrive in the post for me from one environmental organisation or another, be it from the RSPB or in this case the local Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust. Their quarterly newsletter for kids included a writing competition where you had to write a five hundred word short story on about the environment. 

This was very much in my wheelhouse and I barely had to think about it before an idea developed in my head. A quick bit of research later- well not that quick because this was still the days of dial-up internet- and I'd identified the star of my story. Within a few days I had written The Kinkajou about the titular Amazon rainforest resident coming face to face with a pair of loggers. I forced my Dad to post it to the trust and then I waited. 

Eventually I received a letter informing me I was the winner. Rather than being posted the prize I was to be awarded it at the opening of the Wildlife Trust's new headquarters. Some weeks later my Dad and I made the long trek over. Living right on the Western border of Hampshire meant it was actually a fair trip. Eventually an opening ceremony took place and present was TV naturalist Chris Packham. Now to be honest, I don't think I knew who Chris Packham was at the time but I never did pay much attention to the humans on TV. I remember an English task at school around this time time where we had to cast a film version of Romeo and Juliet and I genuinely couldn't name a single actor. I'd almost certainly seen Chris present pieces on The Really Wild Show though.

There was various people saying a quick word about the opening of the new headquarters and then a group of local schoolchildren got to go up and shake hands with Chris Packham for whatever thing they'd done at school. Then it was my turn. I remember feeling utterly overwhelmed as my name was called and I, the award-winning writer, stood in the middle of a crowd and shook hands with the guy off the TV. 

That could have been it but there were various things happening as part of the opening day and somehow my Dad and I managed to get into a presentation Chris Packham was giving, I think tied in with his book Back Garden Nature Reserve. I remember sitting there thinking that the whole thing was utterly brilliant and thinking that I wanted to do this job, whatever it was, when I grew up. Afterwards Chris signed books which didn't take that long because the room could only fit about twenty people. My Dad being my Dad he happily chatted to Chris, including I think about cats catching wildlife. 

By this point it was just me, my Dad and Chris Packham in a little room. Chris was really great, happily kept talking and he was so fantastic with me. I was always very shy and the fact that I'd spent much of the day in huge crowds meant I was feeling especially bashful. Chris though kept talking to me and made me feel really valued. He gave me the advice to keep moving on, now I'd learned about the kinkajou to go and learn about something else. I so often felt weird and out of place but Chris Packham made me feel like it was OK to be who I was and indeed actively encouraged it. We were also both neurodiverse in different ways, though neither of us knew it at the time, so perhaps we sensed that our brains worked in not dissimilar ways.

Since then Chris Packham has become more prominent, presenting Springwatch and other major programmes and being highly outspoken about conservation issues. My long planned career in conservation never materialised, mainly because I couldn't work out a way into without any practical skills, but nonetheless that day sticks firmly in my mind. That day was probably the first time, one of the only times in my whole life, where a stranger has accepted me for who I am and encouraged me to keep being that person. 

They say never meet your heroes but Chris Packham actually became my hero when I met him rather than the other way around. Since then I've watched many of Chris' programmes and continued to be inspired and found his memoir Fingers in the Sparkle Jar one of the best books I have ever read- as well as being just brilliantly written it's a very frank depiction of his mental health struggles. Some people make the world a better place and Chris Packham is one of them- he certainly made my world a better place.