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From the date in the front cover I have had this book since January 2020 and I think I have been trying to read it, off and on, ever since – I found it hard to really engage with it, the jumping around in chronologies was sometimes a challenge to follow.
And maybe this is a characteristic that sees to Chris Packman’s encounter with the world – his neurodiversity created a separation from most of those around him.
One aspect that I enjoyed was that Chris grow up in Southampton and a various points there are references to places in and around the City that I know – although most have changed in the decades since he was a child.
While this is a story, in part, of the origins of Chris’ passion for nature which has driven his career there is a lot of death in it, and often it seems Chris is the source of it. This might not be exactly the origin story we would expect.
It is also an account of Chris much later in life addressing, through therapy, his attempted suicide – this provides a counter point to the first person narrative of his childhood.
Overall it is a jigsaw, and probably like any life story we don’t have all the pieces, we don’t have the picture on the box for reference, we are trying to connect the pieces glimpse the image, and I think Chris is actually doing the same – it feels that the process of writing this will have been a therapeutic one.
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