It's had something of the opposite effect on me though, while I still bought the book I now don't think I could watch Chris Packham on TV. Sadly, my expectations were dashed when I found out that the whole book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that focuses on descriptions which last for pages and pages. Chris seems remarkably unconcerned by these attacks, but he deserves our support even if he might shrug them off anyway. Packham's partner Charlotte Corney owns the Isle of Wight Zoo, and his step-daughter is studying zoology at Liverpool University.

In 2011, he was awarded the British Trust for Ornithology's Dilys Breese Medal for his 'outstanding work in promoting science to new audiences', and in 2016 he won the Wildscreen Panda Award for Outstanding Achievement, for his contribution to wildlife filmmaking. An introverted, unusual young boy, isolated by his obsessions and a loner at school, Chris Packham was only at home in the fields and woods around his suburban home. The deeply relatable memoir of a boy growing up on the edge of a nowhere town, not really grasping how people work and much happier wandering the half-wild edgelands or engrossed in his own worlds. And then I wiped away the spilled slop of the river, polished the glare and thrust my fingers into the sparkle jar to stir the soft tickles of the swirling tinsel of fishes.Bookbag also enjoyed A Sting in the Tale by Dave Goulson which will appeal to anyone with a passion for wildlife. Whilst described as a memoir it is more a collection of perfectly framed moments, some of which are hauntingly beautiful, others are heart wrenchingly sad and some are just downright icky. Instead the book is a series of beautifully written but often deeply disturbing snapshots of Packham as he grew up.

Chris Packham's memoir Fingers in the Sparkle Jar is a brutal, beautiful book that subverts the memoir genre through third person accounts of events involving him.Both Chris and indeed Mark have done an amazing job (not least in trying to encourage the next generation of conservation champions), as have others and we must all help them however we can as conservation is a broad community and I sense a collective determination that will persevere and deliver a ban. Memories from Chris’ childhood explorations are captured with such intense devotion and curiosity, I found it so charming, heartbreaking, and inspiring.

He is best known for the BAFTA-winning The Really Wild Show and fronting BBC's Springwatch and Autumnwatch. His parents were gracious and tolerant with the way that he saw the world and the way that it saw him, but the way people failed to understand him did intensify the internal conflicts he suffered from.I ended up skimming entire sections, as it was often just more details about the same experiences with the same animals. Be they victorian glass vases, 1930’s tea pots, art deco brooches to a nice Vivienne Westwood jacket. He would spend hours outside looking for specimens, poring over his collections and boiling carcases to get to the bones.

In other parts of the book he sees himself as he would have appeared through other people's eyes (the ice cream man, or an elderly neighbour). At the centre of the book is his relationship with the kestrel he kept; this reminded me of the excellent H is for Hawk.The descriptions of nature, wildlife and the countryside brims with his passion for his favoured subjects. As an adult, Chris was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, which may explain his social awkwardness as a child and intense obsession with nature; an obsession that he managed to forge into a successful career. Woven in are accounts of his meetings with a phycologist, where he takes the tentative, painful steps of opening up to a stranger and it is where we learn of his greatest fears and those moments where he has stood at the abyss. But the creature he most coveted was a kestrel, a real live kestrel, and one day he was to realise that dream.