Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with naturalist and TV presenter Chris Packham. 21/02/2024
Introduction
Elizabeth
Hello and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield and this is a podcast about the deep values and principles of those who shape our public conversation. Every episode I speak to someone who has some kind of public voice and platform which, let’s be honest, is increasing numbers of us, about what they hold sacred, by which I mean what are the driving principles they have at least tried to live their life by. I speak to people from all different tribes and perspectives, different political positions, different metaphysical beliefs. I’ve spoken to artists and actors and archbishops. I’ve spoken to politicians and poets and playwrights, journalists, agogo, business leaders. And I absolutely love trying to listen for the person behind the position, for the person behind the public persona, and adopting a posture of empathy and curiosity no matter where they are coming from or how they may or may not look, sound, think or believe like me.
In this episode, I had a conversation with Chris Packham. Chris is a naturalist, nature photographer, television presenter and activist, best known for his many, many decades of presenting nature programs and natural history programs. The Really Wild Show is where he started, one of the favourite programmes of my childhood, and he’s now regularly seen on Springwatch and Winterwatch on the BBC but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of his output. We spoke about his childhood growing up in suburban Southampton and I had a little cry about what a hard time he had as a child who didn’t yet know that he was autistic and who was obsessively interested in the natural world and animals and natural history. He really speaks beautifully and vulnerably about the difficulties of that time. We spoke about the power of television to teach and engage and open up the world and connect with people at a mass scale and how his thinking around that has developed as he’s worked in that over the years. We spoke about his autism. We spoke about love, we spoke about grief, we spoke, I think, about what it is to be a human being and it was a huge privilege. There is as usual some reflections from me at the end of the podcast and I really hope you enjoy listening.
Chris, I’m gonna ask you a question that is deliberately not small talk or warming people up. I think we probably share a preference for that. I want you to reflect for me on what is sacred to you. You can take that wherever you like. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything religious. It’s much more about what are the deep values or principles that you have tried to let guide your life. You can take it in whatever direction you want.
What is sacred to you? Chris Packham responds
Chris Packham
I think they’ve changed quite radically, frankly, from the time that I was a child up until this point. At this point, it won’t surprise you to know that I hold life sacred. I am not quite Jainist in an obsessive sense, but I am the sort of guy that will allow mosquitoes to bite them if they’re not in a malarial zone and I will dissuade them from biting me by using repellent or I will push them from my skin very gently. I don’t like extinguishing life unnecessarily and therefore I hate the idea of people killing things for pleasure. That’s a complete anathema to me. Now I know that we have to manage wildlife populations. I know that we have to cull animals in order to generate a richer mosaic of habitats to support a greater diversity of those animals, plants and fungi. So I’m not precious about life in that sense, but I do hold it as sacred.
Everything is there for a reason. Everything wants to live. Nothing wants to die at all, and so preserving that life is really important. But then I could go back to a time when I was a child. I unfortunately, you know, extinguished lots of lives. I did put ladybirds into matchboxes and I did forget about them for several days, and I did then open them and they’d been dried and desiccated. There were newts that shriveled behind the gas fire. There was a snake which disappeared beneath the floorboards and probably never came out. And when I was keeping predatory animals that required food, I would get that food for them and that meant killing other animals to feed them properly. So that’s changed.
I think the other most consistent sacred values that I’ve held, were those obviously implanted if not instilled by my parents, and that is honesty and truth. I think that they became increasingly compatible with my scientific outlook. For me, science is the art of understanding truth and beauty. Truth is an integral part of that. Science is about uncovering the truth as we can and will know it at this point in time. That doesn’t mean that it’s not flexible. There were scientific truths which are no longer true. I think that honesty is part of that as well. I think again, because of my neurodiversity, and I say this because I’ve asked other neurodiverse people and we share a commonality, we have an aggravated sense of injustice. We don’t like people getting away with things and essentially therefore we don’t like lies and I struggle a lot and I always have done when people lie to me. I find that extremely difficult to deal with so as a consequence of that I’m prone to telling the truth myself which gets me into all sorts of trouble because, people sometimes don’t want to hear the frank stark truth as I see it. As a child, my mother called me the least tactful boy in the world. These days, I moderate my truth telling, obviously to manage myself in social situations and professional situations. I don’t unnecessarily tell people that the absolute truth as I see it. I suppose those are the are the core sacred values that remain honesty, truth, and understanding the very deep and important sacred nature of life.
Elizabeth
Sometimes it’s hard for us to know what’s sacred to us, right? Our society doesn’t encourage us to spend a lot of time in this deep reflection. We’re often just spending time jumping hoops and responding to stimuli, but often these things often are forced up into our consciousness at real decision points, at crunch points, at moments of moral profundity, when we have to decide whether to be loyal to them those principles or not or whether to compromise. Can you think of times in your life where it’s felt like, oh, I have to follow these things that are sacred to me or maybe you haven’t been able to, but you had that wrestle?
Chris Packham
I think that I’m naturally quite an introspective person. I’ve always been thinking, again, from the time that I was a child, about who I am, where I am, what I am, and to some extent where I’ve come from, what has made me that person. Throughout my teenage years, which were quite solitary at times, that introspection and I’d like to call it deeper thinking, but I don’t mean that in an intellectual sense, contemplative sense rather than an intellectual sense, was a significant part of it. By the time I was in my late teens I remember having quite long conversations with my sister who shared that commonality and we would sit there on the edge of her bed, back at my parents, contemplating who we were and why I was different for quite a long period of time. And maybe it was struggling to understand that difference which has always kept that at the forefront of my mind. So as a consequence, I’m probably less regularly surprised by having to deal with aspects of who I am and how I manifest myself. Because I’ve already been thinking about that. So in terms of wrestling with those things, probably not as much. Now, having said that, during my 40s, I had a quite a significant mental health crisis and had three years of therapy. Of course, that did open some cupboards, which I’d previously chosen to keep quite tightly closed. So I can’t say that I’m squeaky clean when it comes to fully understanding myself. But in the aftermath of that therapy I knew how to look after myself better, that was for sure.
Religious diversity at home
Elizabeth
I’m really glad to hear that. I want to hear a little bit more about your childhood, if that’s okay. You’ve given us some little vignettes of the boy that you were, but I’m particularly interested in any sort of formative ideas that were in the air. They’re usually not explicit, usually implicit, but religious or political or philosophical, what were you receiving in your childhood from those around you?
Chris Packham
Okay, so let’s deal with them in order. So religious to start with. So my father was a staunch atheist. My mother didn’t have an interest in religion, but they were both very keen on taking us to monuments. So we would spend quite a lot of time in old churches, obviously cathedrals, temples, all of those sorts of things. I think they realized that religion was an integral part of culture. In order to understand that culture, an easy route in was through those sort of portals basically. I continue to use that to this day. There’s nothing more I love more than going somewhere new and going into an old church, reading the inscription, sitting down for an hour, smelling it, soaking it up, listening to the sounds. There were some very, very beautiful old churches in the area where I lived in France and I would often drive out to them and I’d mince around in the graveyard looking at wildlife for five minutes but then I would just go and sit in there to soak up the ambiance of that and try to imagine all the people that had been there, the trials and tribulations of their lives and the things that had shaped their lives. There was a church around the corner from me that was founded in Saxon times. I loved being able to touch the fabric of all of that history and the constancy of religion throughout that period of time is what has kept those buildings there and kept that running.
Now, having said that about my parents and my father’s atheism, we were brought up with very strict Christian values. So in terms of the fundamentals of essentially how to behave and how to be a proper person were undoubtedly founded on Christian values. There was no doubt about that at all. Then in later life my mother became a very religious person and my father joined in with everything. He would go to the church, he would support her with all of the things that he did. I guess he kind of moderated completely there. We were constantly exposed to religion. We were taught about it. It’s just that my parents were not believers when I was a child.
Elizabeth
I’m sorry to interrupt, I want to come back, but I’m just really interested, what happened with your mum? What made her change?
Chris Packham
So my mother had quite a catastrophic childhood. She was in an Anderson shelter in the Second World War that took a direct hit and it took out half of her family. We can’t even imagine the horror of that. I think that and a number of other traumas left a mark and my mother was very afraid of death. When she reached a point in her life that her relatives and friends gradually and sadly began to die she needed to reach out and find some security, not necessarily security in religion and the church, but in that community that was brought together around that faith. That community and its focused faith became a very important part of her life. It was a pleasure to watch my father embracing that. Obviously we all embraced it, but my dad had such fervent views that to watch them moderate and disseminate because of his understanding of what my mother required at that point in her life was touching and joyous in many ways. My dad would go to enormous effort to support my mother when it came to sort of church bizarres, church fairs, any of the events, and he would get fully immersed in the whole thing. I remember on one occasion, it was a lovely sunny afternoon and we were at the church fete and talking to everyone and and I looked over and my mum and dad were together running some sort of quiz thing that they were doing. My sister and I just looked at one another and just nodded and thought, if only he’d seen himself when he was ranting, as he had been like 40 years earlier.
Elizabeth
It’s incredibly romantic.
Chris Packham
It was romantic and my parents were not romantic people. I mean, not openly romantic. There was quite a lot of antagonism between them. They were two intelligent working class people that had been denied the opportunity to further their education due to the Second World War and the lack of money and their class. They were struggling with that throughout their lives, they were always trying to better themselves. My mother was a faddist. So one moment she’d be learning how to play the harp, the next minute she’d be teaching herself Russian. My father would have to consume at least four books a week, most of them textbooks, most of them about military history or history. For him, it was the acquisition of knowledge which gave him context that was very, very important. They were desperate for me and my sister to progress with our academic education. They certainly weren’t trying to live their lives through ours, but they were very keen to get us beyond secondary school, and they succeeded. Both of us went on to study at university and they were very supportive of that throughout. I’m painting quite a rosy picture here, there were extreme difficulties, particularly between my mother and myself, but they were always invested in our education. That was of pre–eminent importance. I’m very grateful for that. Obviously, the greatest joy of my life is learning. I continue to learn and I love it. It’s the best bit.
Chris Packham’s science obsession and social exclusion
Elizabeth
Tell me about kind of how that started and I guess particularly around this fascination with the natural world. What’s your very first memory of turning that powerful attention and being drawn in by that fascination?
Chris Packham
Well, my parents tell me before I can remember, it was about ladybirds and tadpoles and those very simple everyday organisms that lived in our tiny garden in suburban Southampton. I loved them because of their beauty. They were symmetrical, they were perfect, they didn’t limp. Everyone looked like it had come out of a beautiful mold., I just loved them. I loved the diversity of their form. I loved the way that they felt, the stickiness of a slug, the dryness of a beetle tickling your palm as you tried not to crush it, having caught it and trying to get it into a jam jar. I would try to exercise all of my senses to take in as much of that natural world as possible. I necessarily immersed myself in it and I was an obsessionist as a child. I’d get so into one thing and it would only be about tadpoles. There was no point in having a conversation about lizards or otters or bats. If I was into tadpoles, it was just tadpoles. So that was quite challenging for my parents on that account, obviously. I was into the space race in the sixties, bearing in mind I was born in 61. I was into all of that, but my focused interest was always natural history at that point in my life.
Elizabeth
I gather it made things quite difficult socially at school.
Chris Packham
Well, the obsessional nature of it was difficult. I was only really interested in that. There were other aspects of the neurodiversity, which with the benefit of hindsight, certainly made life tricky at school. I’m a very task–focused person. So before we started to speak, I have a task that I need to complete today, but I didn’t start it because I knew that we were going to be speaking, it would have been uncomfortable for me to have started it and then stopped to come and do this. I would have been itching at this point to go and get on with it. So when the bell went for the end of the lesson, it didn’t necessarily work for me. If I hadn’t finished the task I’d been set, then I couldn’t really understand why I’d have to go and start another one somewhere else. So there were many things, day–to–day difficulties in school, the regularity of the time, certain lessons which I just didn’t want to engage with, I had no interest in whatsoever. So if I was interested in something, I would immerse myself completely. If I wasn’t, then I wouldn’t turn up. So that again presented difficulty. But it was the 1960s. No one knew what was going on. I didn’t know what was going on. I have no recriminations to my parents or any of the teachers or anyone. It was an unknown phenomenon and luckily I managed to bruise through it.
Elizabeth
Did they know that you were bullied and excluded and really struggling?
Chris Packham
Yes, but they came from that generation. My mum had a bomb on the shelter. She was evacuated after that out of the city, but my father had to stay and his house was bombed as well. Mental health was not something that was ever discussed at home. I’d have needed a leg amputated not below the knee but at the hip to even get half a day off of school.
It was that generation that said, just pull yourself together and get on with it. Sympathy about physical injuries, illness and those sorts of things was in pretty short supply. Those things were encumbrances to be overcome as rapidly as possible. I’m not saying they didn’t nurse me if I cut myself, of course they did, but as soon as the plaster was on, get back to doing what you were doing before. That was their attitude. I think that was a legacy of their own upbringing. No doubt about it.
Elizabeth
I’d love to hear about a moment that you’ve spoken of and written of very beautifully as meaningful, but I’m aware it might be painful. So please tell it as feels appropriate for you today. I’d love to hear about the falcon that you nursed and that moment in your childhood and adolescence.
Chris Packham
Well it was in my early adolescence, I was obsessed with kestrels at that time. I was utterly obsessed with them. They were the be all and end all of my universe. I had this kestrel, I was totally devoted to it. I don’t remember anything else that happened in my life for that six months. Everything was about that one organism.
Elizabeth
How did you get it?
Chris Packham
I took it from a nest, because we’d gone through a process of applying for a license at that point. You could apply for a home office license, but working class oiks from Southampton didn’t get them. I’d already developed a healthy mistrust or lack of respect for any authority. So, if people said no, that didn’t mean no, as far as I was concerned. That was again manifesting as trouble at school because I sometimes wouldn’t do as I was told. Anyway, my parents were a bit upset about the fact that I’d essentially broken the law. But they forgave me because there was no way they were going to get take that bird away from me. There was no question of that.
I fell in love with the bird, it became the epicenter of everything. It was the nucleus and I was the electrons that just buzzed around it with an intensity and a fury, the likes of which were incomprehensible. The whole thing was, as I say, utterly breathless. It became ill with a disease which could now be very easily treated, but at the time couldn’t, and it died. I didn’t know what was going on. I was always already having trouble because of the neurodiversity. Then I was having trouble because of the trauma of losing the bird. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t make words come out. My parents had this thing that I had to carry on going to school. So I went to school, I couldn’t speak. I got bullied even more because I couldn’t communicate to anyone. I went on for, I don’t know, a couple of weeks. The aftermath was all a bit of a blur as well. It was just utterly traumatic and, and it obviously had a profound impact on my life. The fact that it coincided with that whole separate social separation between myself and my peers, which was happening far more rapidly at that point, it had really accelerated. The exclusion and the bullying was really ramping up and it occurred at that point, so it just fed and fueled what was essentially enormous personal turmoil. Lucky to get through it, frankly. I was very lucky to get through all of that.
I do talk about it because something good has to come from it and if I can speak about it and help other young people, particularly neurodiverse young people, who may find themselves in a similar position, sat in their bedroom, there’s no tunnel, let alone light at the end of any tunnel. I can somehow help them to realise that there is a way, there is a path forward, you’ve just got to hang on and find it, then it serves a real purpose. I hate the idea of anyone else having to go through so much solitary, disconnected, abject pain, basically.
Rejecting authority with punk culture
Elizabeth
One of the places, or one of the ways you found to process or hold or release some of that pain was when you connected with punk culture. I feel like for a lot of people, it’s just sort of angry singers with mohawks. Could you say a bit more, because I think there’s a more kind of philosophical profound posture behind it that you found helpful?
Chris Packham
There was the fashion and obviously there was the music and they were unified around an attitude. And it was the attitude persists in me and others from that generation. And so that was clearly what was at the core of it. It was about do it yourself. It was about not having any expectations for anyone to help you do anything if you didn’t do it yourself. And it was also about rebellion. It was about questioning authority, not disrespecting it, but questioning it. If there was a reason to do something, the reason needed to be understood and explained. It was about not just standing in line and doing it, but without wondering, without even wondering why. And there was an enormous determination and it was fueled by a lot of anger. We’re talking about mid–seventies here. And I think there were a fair contrast with some aspects of the contemporary period. There was very high unemployment. I went to a huge comprehensive, I had a five minute careers interview which ended with if you don’t get to go to sixth form, you could think about joining the army, the Air Force or the Navy. So there wasn’t a lot of prospects in material terms on the horizon. That part of that generation was going to go and say, no, Jim, I’m going make my own prospects. So we made our own fashion. I was coming to terms with the fact that I was different, I didn’t know why, I didn’t understand anything about that. I found it almost impossible to articulate it because I didn’t understand it and I was young. But what I did, what the punk thing allowed me to do was identify physically as being different from everyone else. I did have the black spiky hair, the studded leather jacket, and you know, the blue brothel creepers, these 1950s crepes shoes.
The point is that standing on the street, all of a sudden, I looked different and I felt different. So it was a way of manifesting that. That worked as quite a good separating mechanism because people were intimidated by that very confrontational fashion. So they would avoid you. They’d either avoid you or beat you up. I was getting used to getting beaten up anyway. So for me, it was incredibly important. Some of the ethos, the lyrics, the poetry, the art that came with it were hugely instrumental in shaping what I became and who I am. Look just behind me on the wall there, there’s a framed lyrics page written by a lady called Pauline Murray. She was the lead singer of a band called Penetration. They wrote a song called Shout Above the Noise. To me, those lyrics encapsulated everything I felt at the time and what I continue to feel today. That will be going in the box with me. That is the ultimate treasure. She wrote it out and signed it for me. It’s part and parcel of my life and who I am. And I’m very pleased about that.
Elizabeth
These things almost become forms of prayers or scriptures to us, songs or poems or films that we tell over and over to ourselves as part of how we make ourselves and our identity.
Chris Packham
It is a mantra and I will repeat it and I will, you know, I’ll ingest it. I’ll play it loud in the car, the song, and I’ll sing along. Obviously, I know every word. It is about overcoming difficulty at all costs, never giving up. That is the key thing. Never giving up. Never allow anyone to be in a position where they can make you stop.
TV: a chance encounter and its capacity to inspire
Elizabeth
You went to university and studied biology, I think, at Southampton. It sounds like found a bit more peace there and a bit more space to get involved and love the studying. I’m really intrigued by why you didn’t just pursue an academic career and instead did this move into television.
Chris Packham
So I had always intended to do that. From about 13 onwards, I’d imagine myself in an ivory tower studying birds for the rest of my life until I became bearded and old and writing papers. I loved learning, I loved science. My management technique at university was unusual, I didn’t socialize. I went to hometown university. I’d say ‘20 pence please’ twice a day twice a day to the bus conductor and I wouldn’t speak to anyone else. I sat at the front, I missed one lecture in three years because I was extremely ill. So I loved all the learning. I struggled with the other aspects of being in a social space with lots of other young people going through enormous changes in their lives due to that time of life. I got to the point where I wrote a PhD proposal, had it accepted, and I was going to stay on at Southampton and do that.
Then a few things happened that I felt were wrong and I couldn’t control them. Again, not being able to control things is one of life’s problems. So I dropped out and I just sort of thought, I can’t do this. The playing field wasn’t equal and I didn’t want to be batting on a losing wicket from day one. I had to bail out and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was virtually unemployable. I had ridiculous colored hair, terrible fashion sense. I was obsessed with the natural world. I hadn’t read any decent literature. I just read scientific papers from the age of 13. Opportunities were quite narrow. By simply by accident, I mean, I literally met a guy at a bus stop and got talking. In fact, we had an argument. Then I ended up working for him and that’s how I drifted into television. It wasn’t a plan in any way, shape or form. I didn’t watch much TV as a kid. I liked Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. I loved documentaries, Horizon, Chronicle, Ascent of Man, Vinovsky. I loved all those sorts of things but I wasn’t really massively into TV as a form of educational entertainment.
Elizabeth
I love that guy that first encountered with you was an argument. He thought, I want to hire this guy. I like his spirit.
Chris Packham
Yeah, I met him for a second time. We had an argument on one occasion. Then I met him again in virtually the same place. He lived near there and so did I. We were crossing a bridge and he was coming towards me. I thought, oh, no, is that guy I had a row with and he’s thinking the same. We had another row on the bridge. In the aftermath of that, he offered me a job. So there you go. He was like me. He was quite a confrontational person. But in a creative way, you know. I am the sort of person that can argue with people and I never bear a grudge, you know, I just think you share a difference of opinion and you move on, and there were people in my life who I disagree with, enormously over some topics, but that doesn’t mean I need to separate from them or hold it against them. As long as we understand where we come from, we can accept it and that’s part of the way it is.
Elizabeth
Amen. That’s an important thing we need to hold fast to. You have had a very, very established, eminent presenting career. I am always fascinated by our kind of common life and our public conversations and how people think about what they do, whether they sort of think of their vocation and what is it they’re trying to do. I’d love to hear what you think really good television can do for our common life. When you finish a series or something and you think, yes, I did a good job there, I did something good in the world, what is it that has happened?
Chris Packham
I haven’t got to that point yet, but I’m working towards it. I see other good that has come from it. One accessible and obvious case would be Sir David Attenborough. Sir David has made a raft of programmes over a number of decades, moving through all sorts of television technologies from black and white to 3D and HD and every other D. He’s communicated with a global audience to generate an enormous affinity for the natural world at a time when that natural world has been plunged into crisis. And if people didn’t love it, if they hadn’t connected with it, if they hadn’t listened to his stories and been fascinated by his tales of science, they wouldn’t be interested in looking after it. So his legacy is profound. Carl Sagan, I remember watching Carl Sagan as a kid and then in the 70s, and I remember his capacity to communicate beautifully, not just the science, but the romance as well. Carl Sagan’s Little Blue Dot, is profoundly brilliant science when you think of when that Voyager spaceship was launched, it was probably made out of Meccano, you know. Also the romance, and I think that that’s what David’s storytelling has always added to the equation. We relate to those stories and he’s integrated them into our lives and his legacy is extremely significant. There were plenty of others that I can think about who were great communicators. Alan Wicker, I remember watching as a child and he could go from a homeless beggar to the Pope or a fascist despot and sit down and open a conversation with them and draw something out of them that you would want to know. His skill as an interviewer was remarkable.
Television does have that capacity. It’s becoming more challenging because we’re in an age of changing media. We’re into fast media now, the social media platforms are being used to communicate for good and ill. We struggle of course a lot with misinformation in those unregulated platforms, whereas obviously everything we do on the BBC is checked and fact checked and double checked and then we check it again. We are very diligent about that, but that due diligence isn’t there in some of those other platforms. So we’re going through that period of change. You can tell stories through a shot, a sequence, a program or a series, and that means that people can still walk away having watched and listened to something, and it has the capacity to transform their lives in many ways. They can be better educated, they can be stimulated. Every now and again you see something makes you want to shout, it can be quite a euphoric reaction to things that you see.
From a personal point of view I’m not a directly ambitious person. If you said to me, what would I want to be doing in, I was going to say five years, but that would be laughably too long, even a year’s time, I wouldn’t have an answer for you. There are a couple of programs that we’re interested in making now, but you know, I’m downstairs converting my garage into a studio so I can make more sculpture. I only started doing that this time last year. So things come and go, I just need to be productive. I need to be, making sure that I can exercise my small voice for good when it comes to environmental, wildlife, animal welfare concerns. I’ve got to use that, it’s my duty and I’ll continue to do so for as long as I can. But I don’t like generating expectations. And again, I think that’s a legacy of childhood and the teenage time when I would generate expectations and they would fail and it hurt too much. So I don’t do that any longer. I don’t generate expectations of people or particularly myself. I know I’ve failed myself and I don’t want to have to live with the failure.
Elizabeth
Forgive me if this is too prying. I am very comfortable with people just having a firm boundary, but I can’t help but ask. What you’re saying is making me think about a lot of practices in different traditions around how you hold our own fragility and our fallibility without just shutting down and hardening. How you surrender, how you find a place of acceptance. My friend Casper calls them spiritual technologies, but you know, they show up in recovery movement, they show up in therapy. My shorthand would be, what have you found that helps you tend to your soul as you learn about yourself and you learn about the world and what helps you live well, but you can completely reject the spiritual language if that feels like an imposition.
Chris Packham
I like the spiritual language. I think firstly, I don’t need a solution. I don’t expect not to have a troubled soul. I don’t need to be working to a point where I’m comfortable or content. I think that if anything, I fear comfort and contentment. I fear them because they might introduce complacency and laziness. So I like struggling. I make trouble and I know that trouble is going to be a struggle. I took on another court case yesterday against a significant body who were going to really push back and make my life difficult and generate an enormous amount of animosity, an enormous amount of work, but it’s the right thing to do. I know at this point that that’s going to make life more difficult. But I don’t I don’t fear that. I suppose I’m not looking for a conclusion. mean, I need some respite and solace. I get that on a day to day basis way with walking my dogs in the woods, it’s good for my mental health. I’ve been there this morning been out, I’ve had a sniff about, so have they. We enjoy each other’s company. We’re on our own. I always like to walk on my own. I’ve been out for an hour and a half on my own in the woods. Can’t think of anything finer, to be honest with you. That’s great. But when I get back, I’m quite happy to jump straight back into the frying pan or the cauldron. I think that I’m not on that sort of journey where I see an end point. I don’t expect to be able to reach that point of like, as you say, soulful rest.
Autism: persistence and love
Elizabeth
It makes a lot of sense of your like scrappy–do energy, from the punk, from the campaigning, from the conversations about climate, from arguing with a guy at bus stop and on a bridge, that feels normal and livable to you in a way that it might not for people who have lower tolerance for conflict or are trying to find a sort of inner tranquility. You’ve sometimes talked about your form of autism being maybe related to this and seeing that, and you’ve talked about Greta Thunberg and others, when did you come to sort of be able to connect the dots with those things? This kind of justice seeking activist energy in you and the fact that you’re autistic.
Chris Packham
I think I became aware of the existence of autism at some point in the early 90s or mid 90s. I had partners who were nurses or in the medical profession and one of them was on part of a course and she was learning about autism and she came home and she said well this is a bit like you isn’t it and you do this and you say that and you’ve done that. And then I found a letter years ago that I’d written to her, but not posted. It was a list of traits which matched the criteria which she was studying in. I didn’t really do much with it. I’d already come up with a sort of a crude management plan that allowed me to blunder through life and blunder through those relationships and destroyed most of them. It was roller coaster, but it was generally moving in a direction, not necessarily the right direction, but it was moving. It hadn’t ground to a standstill. And so I suppose the energy just kept me going. I’d learneda few things that I should and shouldn’t do to get me through my professional life and to some extent my personal social life was.
But then I didn’t get the diagnosis until after that period of therapy. At the time I didn’t think it was very valuable because I’d already figured it out and I was 40 something. But with the benefit of hindsight it was useful and I think it’s given me more confidence to actually outwardly acknowledge who I am. I only know a couple of people that I’ve known since I’ve had the diagnosis, in the sense that I still speak to them and see them. They say to me, no, you’ve changed. You’ll tell people now, you’ll ask them directly to do things that will be of a benefit to you and them. It will make your life more compatible and more productive and more efficient. Whereas in the past, you would try to have coaxed those things and try to make them happen sometimes clumsily and they would have failed and then things would have gone awry. Whereas now I just put the card straight on the table. So I think that that’s empowering and that’s been useful. But in terms of acquainting that to the outward attitude, I think there is a definitely a relationship between the two. I see that because I do meet other people who have as you say my form of autism. We’re fighters and we are affronted by injustice and we feel a compunction to tell the truth as we see it. We won’t back down and we’re not terribly good at compromising that truth. So we’re fighters because you have to fight if you’re not going to compromise. Greta is one, and there are a couple of other people I know, probably better not name, but and we’re all very similar in that regard.
Elizabeth
I live in a very, very tiny intentional community. One of the questions we ask each other is how can I love you well? Which is a shorthand for, tell me what you need. Tell me how you need me to communicate or tell me how I can help in this moment because it’s really different for other people. I think we tend to assume that other people want what we want when they often don’t. Obviously we’ve never met in person and it would be very very presumptuous of me to say Chris Packham, tell me how I can love you well. But for listeners who are coming to awareness of autism and neurodivergence and just want to be better citizens, people part of a common community, what would you want them to know? What helps you? Because different autistic people need different things, but there are some commonalities.
Chris Packham
I think it’s a great question. I think the way that we understand, manifest, and manage love is pretty fundamental to who we are, because surely love has to be centered around the really core values in our life. I think that the critical thing, and this is perhaps a neurodiverse thing, is that there’s not a lot of gray in my life. I don’t think there’s any gray at all. It’s black or white. I mean, I either love you or, no, I don’t say hate any longer because I think hate is a really unpleasant emotion. It takes enormous amounts of energy. It’s enormously destructive. I don’t hate people anymore, but I will dislike things. I hardly often I don’t very often dislike individual people, but I might dislike things that they do. I said hate again, at the beginning of this, when we first started speaking and I’m very conscious of that and I wish I hadn’t because it’s not an emotion that I that I manifest.
But love is and I think therefore, for me, unfortunately, there’s no 99.9%. There is only 100%. So if I love some thing or someone, I give them everything, absolutely everything, total commitment. I’m task centric, so I will break down and analyze what I think their requirements are and I would try to satisfy them 100%, not 99.9.%. I can’t have a lazy day. So when I was younger, that was a clumsy process, that would be oppressive. That could be stifling for people. Because it may not manufacture itself in an obsessive sense. You know, it wasn’t swamping, it wasn’t all over people or anything like that, but that, precision, dedication, it was probably quite intimidating to some people.
Now this goes back to the Kestrel. I gave all of that to that bird and the relationship failed, it died. I’ve given all of that to my dogs. They’ve died. One catastrophically, the others of old age, I’ve given it to other relationships with people and those relationships have failed. So that’s always come at a terrible cost because it’s not 99.9. There’s nothing left. When it goes, everything is gone. There’s nothing left there to hang on to. There’s not a little bit to give something or someone else. It’s all just gone. In terms of mental health, life management, that’s why catastrophic roller coaster is pretty much defined by those sorts of events. If I look at the map of my life on a chart, most of the catastrophes are centered around the loss of my companion animals. Firstly, the kestrel and then my dogs. I’ve been ill–equipped to be able to deal with that immediate, total loss of love and with nowhere for it to go. The vessel that I was constantly filling has suddenly gone. What do I do with it? There’s nowhere for it to go. It’s not generic love. It’s not so I can’t just throw it over the fence and it will love something else. It was very focused on those individuals. That can be a problem.
And in terms of your question, how do you how do you love someone like me? Well, then I’d have to go to my partner, Charlotte, and her approach is very considered. I remember her joining groups of women who were living with autistic partners and she would communicate with them. I mean, she sat downstairs studying psychology. She is one of those people that researches things, thinks about things deeply, tries to absorb and utilize those bits which can be of value at that point in time. So although she’s not a scientist and she doesn’t approach things in a scientific way, she approaches them in a very clever contemplative way. I’m very fortunate that she’s taken that approach to managing our relationship as best she can. Of course, every now and again, I put a spanner in the works, but she’s prepared for those spanners in the main. I’m not saying that it’s always right. And most of the problems I think are generated by my slips, I get lazy and I forget and I do something wrong and again I’m quite harsh in that regard. I’ve got to be harsh because there’s just black or white, so sometimes if it’s if you’re looking for the other tone, either the black or the white and it’s not there, that can seem quite harsh to people.
Elizabeth
It’s such a privilege to talk to you, Chris. I feel like I did not expect to come into this interview and have love be such a big theme. You know, the love of your dad for your mom, Charlotte’s love, your love for your bird and your dogs. And it’s really interesting to me because in lots of ways we’re extremely different. I have too much grey. I can always see all the points of view. I lean humanities, I am not detail oriented, I am people focused, not task focused. If you mapped our personality types, we probably would be opposites, but because we’ve been able to encounter each other at just a vulnerable human, curious, open, not in threat, not in the differences are a problem that they mean that one of us is right and one of us is wrong that we have to defend ourselves or we have to argue for ourselves. What I’m building up to is I feel like we’re losing that skill. It’s easy to see difference as threat, hardening into our perspectives, political or religious or whatever it is. What have you learned as you’ve communicated about neurodivergence? You’ve communicated about climate, one of those most triggering and difficult and wicked problems to talk about without everyone getting very tense very quickly. What helps us keep seeing each other as fully human?
Chris Packham
Kindness, I think. I always say to people, look, in order to solve our problems, environmental, we’ve got to transition. We can’t just switch off. We’re going to need to move in as rapidly as possible, a rapid transition, one hopes. Not everyone is going to run at the same pace. So in order for that transition to work we need to be tolerant of one another. And in order to be tolerant, you’ve got to be patient, and in order to be patient, you’ve got to be kind. So the division that you’ve spoken of, the polarization which blights our life now, is so destructive. I don’t hate Donald Trump. I don’t hate the chief execs of BP and Shell. I could sit down and I could talk to them, you know. But there’s no point in manifesting that degree of polarization. That’s not going to solve any problem whatsoever. And I think it comes again back to those fundamental values. I think we should all be far more tolerant than we are. I think I vaguely remember more tolerance in the world. I mean, we’ve always been fighting one another over ideologies material things and sometimes utter nonsense and that worries me, but you know tolerance is really important.
I’m not an atheist like my dad was I don’t believe in a god but that doesn’t make me I don’t think an atheist, I don’t need to challenge other people’s beliefs, I like the fact that they’ve got those beliefs, I like most of the beliefs that they have. I’m the guy that always listens to Thought For the Day on Radio 4, because I love the breadth of all of those ideas that come from different beliefs, faiths and religions. There’s an enormous commonality between them all. And for me, what I like listening to it is because it’s about humanity, actually. You can break it into faiths if you like, you can subdivide it, you can draw lines in the sand, you can give everyone flags and brand them and tattoo them.
But basically when those people are delivering their messages, they’re talking about humanity. And humanity is broad and diverse. Therefore in order to, I suppose to basically love people, love humanity, you’ve got to be tolerant. We’re compromising the right to protest in the UK now. We’re tightening the laws on protesting. What is that? That’s a lack of tolerance. That’s a lack of saying you’re not entitled to publicly voice your point of view. That’s not gonna work. We’ve seen this historically going in completely the wrong direction before, and it will go in the wrong direction again. So I think that one of the core strengths of religions, as I understand them, is that it’s, they’re centered around humanity, a conscious organism, and the way that we manufacture that conscience and have to exercise it and satisfy it and interact with others’ consciousness. And that’s quite a complex thing and people have gone in different directions in order to come to their belief structure. But ultimately, I don’t see much difference in the messaging, when you really distill it. I love all that messaging. You know, it’s not gonna make me a religious person, but I have enormous respect for those people again, who’ve got the courage. They’ve got the courage to put that whole, everything that means everything, their life’s thoughts, their work, the processes that they’ve come up with, they’re prepared to lay them out in front of you for you to judge, take, reject. You’ve got to admire that, whatever view you might have of it.
Elizabeth
Chris Packham, I cannot express what a privilege it has been to speak to you for the sacred.
Chris Packham
Thank you.
Reflections
Elizabeth Oldfield
What a lovely and thoughtful man. I was expecting someone scrappier. I have read a lot and watched a lot of his output. I knew he’d never been nasty or anything other than decent. But that punk persona and that campaigning persona, and as he said, you know, someone who is quite black and white and truth telling. I didn’t expect him to be so gentle. I didn’t expect just that level of raw vulnerability, which I think can’t help but make you feel hugely tender towards someone. And I asked him about moments when his sacred values became obvious on the surface, but even as I was asking, I thought, I don’t think this is right for you. I think you’re one of the most kind of morally thought out, morally rigorous people that I’ve met. What is the kind of life that you’re trying to live in? It’s not a question, like it is for many of us that only surfaces, you know, when we have the mental space or when we go away from things or when we retreat or at moments of kind of crisis and reflection, big birthdays or bereavements. I think for Chris, it’s been front and centre from very early days, partly because he had to define himself in opposition to a world that wasn’t hugely welcoming to him.
I have really loved learning about punk. It makes just a lot more sense to me as a rebellion and questioning authority, but also the sort of homemade–ness of it is really connecting up now with zine culture. We’ve also had Clementine Morrigan on this series and one of the things she talks about is being a punk. I think there is a kind of resurgence of interest in that culture of making your own things, pursuing your creativity, building your own communities. That can–do attitude and learning to be comfortable with people not really understanding you or maybe even being a bit scared of you or hostile towards you. It’s making me think that when I see someone who is expressing in their body, those alternative choices around hair and clothes and whatever, what’s going on? You know, what’s going on with them? What led them to want to be walking in the world as that as that kind of statement? What is it that that style choice is helping them with. It’s a lovely story about his mum and dad. The way he just speaks about them with such respect. The romance of getting involved in the church of your partner, even if it’s not for you and you’ve been a staunch and lifelong atheist. Chris and it sounds like his sisters have just respect for their mum and that that was a big change for her, but they could see that the community was really life giving for her. Much less hostile and spiky about religion than I was expecting. I know he’s been sort of interested, but various people sent me the thing about what the end of Desert Island is, he said he would use the Bible as firewood. I sort of had that as like a thing in my mind that he might be less warm than I encountered. It’s very interesting.
Gosh, the thing that he said about, well, I said, you know, did your parents know that you were, and he sort of skated over it, but he was brutally bullied. Did your parents know how hard it was for you? And he said, you know, my mom’s family were bombed to death with her there. How deep these generational divides can go. I think that may be our deepest divide, I worry about where we are with it. How hard it is for us to understand people formed by a completely different context and how our language sounds to them, the set of referents, the set of associations they have with some concepts and how important is the work of listening across those divides of listening to those older than us and those younger than us, asking how does the world look like from where you are? What are you afraid of? Or what do you see the good in and you want to affirm? And not assuming that we know. I think the gulf is bigger than we know and could really see it.
Interestingly, we didn’t spend loads and loads of time talking about wildlife, partly because that’s what Chris is known for and there’s a lot out there. If you want to hear him talk about the beauty of the natural world and birds and pumas and bugs and all the least loved, least pretty creatures of our earth, there’s many places you can go for that. I would encourage you, it’s a very delightful thing to go and listen to him enthuse. But I wanted to do something slightly different. So I think what stood out for me most is that, he said he didn’t expect to be content or peaceful. And that is a thing that comes up again as you get to know him a little bit, that life has been a struggle. There has been quite a lot of darkness and a lot of loneliness and a lot of trying to channel that into doing good in the world and fighting injustice where he sees it and standing up for the planet and for autistic people, various other things. So I both feel sad and something in me reacts against his kind of like, I just don’t expect to be peaceful, I don’t expect to be content. But also there’s a real dignity in it and a real sort of self–understanding. It seems like it’s sort of a functional position to get to.
At the end, toleration, which is a word that I just struggle with as a word because it sounds quite thin to me, but I’m very on board about the meaning. How do we notice in ourselves when we are reacting tribally, when we are feeling defensive, when we’re feeling attacky, not because something’s actually unjust or untrue, but just because someone’s different from us or has come to a different conclusion on something to us. How do we steady ourselves in that moment and just go, huh, maybe that’s just okay, maybe I’m not under threat because you’re different from me or dress differently from me or express yourself differently from me or don’t understand me or don’t agree with me.
Finally, I’m thinking about how do we welcome the challenges? I imagine that for a long time, Chris was really difficult to work with. Like someone who has extremely high standards, extremely strong work ethic, massively hard on himself. And as his mother said, the world’s least tactful child. Katherine May said, all autistic people have a history of social rejection. As I said, I’m very different from Chris. My personality does sometimes find people who that’s their style, quite abrasive and quite uncomfortable to be around. But Chris is making me realise what a gift they are. What a gift. What a beautiful and powerful approach to life that we need as well as my more grey zones and wishy washy ameliorative diplomatic approach. What a privilege. I loved that.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield and you’ve heard an interview with Chris Packham. Our production team are Daniel Turner and Fiona Hanscom and our music is by Luke Stanley with vocals by Lizzie Harvey. The Sacred is a project of the think tank Theos. Please come and check out all the rest of Theos’ work. And I love being in conversation with you. You can find me on social media. I have a website. I have a sub stack, myself and the team value so much how many different perspectives you come from. And some of you absolutely love one guest, some of you find another guest really difficult and that just pleases my heart. So be in touch, express your opinions, connect with us. As always, it massively massively helps other people find the podcast, if you review it, tweet it, share it on Instagram, send it to your friends. Basically just give a little bit of a blow it out into the world. We would be so grateful. Until next time, this has been The Sacred Podcast.
