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Robyn Steward Hello. You're listening to 1800 seconds on Autism. I'm Robyn Steward.

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Jamie Knight And I'm Jamie Knight. Welcome back to the podcast. Remember, you can hear all of our previous episodes on 91Èȱ¬ sounds or wherever you get your podcasts from.

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Robyn Steward Joining us today is Chris Packham. When we are recording this, Chris has just released his second 91Èȱ¬ documentary about autism called Inside Our Autistic Minds. It's quite different to his last documentary in 2017. So we're excited to chat to him about it. So Chris, for our listeners who maybe haven't seen it, what's the documentary you've been making about?

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Chris Packham Inside Our Autistic Minds is an opportunity for myself to meet some other autistic people. And for the purposes of our programme, we look at some of their traits and we offer them the opportunity to try and communicate what it's like to experience and live with those traits to our audience. And we do that through making a short film with them. It was a joy to make, I have to say. I'm very pleased to say that they're all very happy with the way things went during the making of the programme and also with the films that they've made. Our first programme that was with Flo, she spoke about masking. Murray is a non-speaking autistic person and he used a voice artist to speak about what it's, what it's like being misjudged in that position and how he yearns to communicate more rapidly and, and effectively with his family. And Tom is a young man who is restricted in some ways by his need and adherence to a very strict temporal schedule. And Ethan is another young man, a student at college. He's a very gifted musician, but he's interrupted by noise.

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Robyn Steward What's it been like for you to meet lots of autistic people? Because obviously being autistic in terms of a diagnosis is quite a new thing for you. And I wonder what it was like meeting loads of different autistic people in the process.

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Chris Packham Well, since I made my first programme back in 2017, I have had an enormous amount of correspondence with other autistic people, some face to face. I don't get on with all of them, to be quite honest with you. I think sometimes the sort of rather didactic, obsessive, almost dominating parts of our characters, if they correspond, then, you know, I still I don't get on with them, but I don't necessarily gravitate to them. I have two autistic people who I know who I do get on with very well, both of whom actually are retired scientists. And I have a great admiration for the way that they've nurtured the attributes that their autism has allowed them academically. But having said that, I can't tell you how much I enjoyed working with Maoi, Flow, Anton and Ethan. Not just them, but their families, too. It was absolutely joyous. It was, you know, what could have been a very stressful programme to make, actually. I mean, it did have its moments, but it was a fantastic production to be working on.

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Robyn Steward Are their things that production teams change to be more autism friendly now that you can disclose. I mean, I don't know if you do disclose, but other things that people put in place, for you that makes your work life easier.

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Chris Packham Yes. And I, I ask them to do that for me and prior, you know, to my diagnosis or even even after the diagnosis, to be honest with you, very often I'd be working in situations which I was finding suboptimal or occasionally difficult. But now I'm just candid and upfront, and I find that the people that I work with are enormously respectful. They might do very often small changes, which mean that I can become a far more effective and productive part of the team. I wouldn't say that those are set in place across the board. I just think that we're now working in an industry whereby if people like myself express the need for those small changes and we do, you know, tell our colleagues, you know, what's going on effectively, then we see a far greater understanding. So as an example of that, when we have meetings at the watches, the springwatch, autumn watch programmes, etcetera, that we make. I like to sit in exactly the same place every single day and I like to have my space. So my space will be a part of that working environment which I control and no one else interferes with. And that's not a terribly big ask. You know, once, of course, people sit in the wrong place and not just say, Excuse me, would you mind if I, I sit there and if they put their coffee cup right in front of me, then I might just gently move. Out of the way. I don't necessarily socialise with them after we finish working. The environments that they choose to, to go to, to relax are not ones that I would find particularly relaxing. In the past. I would have gone with them and I would have sat in the corner, said nothing and suffered. Now I'm up front and I just say, you know, see, tomorrow morning I'd rather go to my room, read a book, do a bit of work, whatever happens to be. So by being sort of just frank and honest, I get a very positive response from my colleagues, which is heartening, of course.

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Jamie Knight Chris, I find a very similar thing in that when I talk to people about the barriers I experience, like, hey, I'm currently, you know, control over an environment makes me feel safe. It means that I can predict what's going to happen. That means I can focus better, means I can get into flow, that I'm more comfortable. Could we make these following changes in order to remove that barrier? That's really effective. And there definitely seems to be more openness now when people say, Hey, actually this environment is very loud for me, or, you know, an example with meetings is I used to work for the 91Èȱ¬. I left last year. One of the meeting rooms we were in had a wall with lots of holes drilled in it. And I basically every time I was in that meeting room, I used to struggle to pay attention to meetings because of the distracting ness of the walls. So I just started sitting with my back to it and it got known as Jamie's spot because it just, it removed one of the barriers that the environment placed on me. So it's good to hear that that's kind of extending to programme making and that there that the people around you are actively aware of the barriers and then making, you know, just, just removing the barriers where they can. It does seem to be 100 small changes and.

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Chris Packham What you've just mentioned is a very small change. It's just allowing you to sit in a position with your back to a source of distraction and therefore it's beneficial to you. You can be more in control, you're more comfortable, therefore effectively you're... it's beneficial to the team because you're going to be more productive, more engaged. So I think it counts in in their favour too. I think the difference is, is actually rather than just sitting there in your case with your back to the distraction and not explaining it and therefore people thinking it's a bit quirky or not respecting the fact that that's where you would like to choose to sit. If we say, look, I'm sitting here because, that's, that's the difference, I think. And people are certainly a lot more open to that than they were in the past. I also like working with the same people, and I think the reason I like working with the same people, well, there are two reasons. One, I'm very fortunate to work with a team that are brilliant. I've managed to surround myself with, you know, people who are dedicated, hardworking, extremely professional and very, very good at what they do. But also it's that it's the comfort of not having to go through that series of explanations because they already know and understand and will accommodate me in whatever small or large way is required. I do find that when I have to go into a new team, I have to sort of start from scratch. And it takes a little while to, not say find the courage, but pick the moment in order to express those, those changes or types of behaviour that I'm going to exhibit, that I'm looking for a little bit more understanding of.

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Robyn Steward Now that you've learned more about autism since your diagnosis, do you think and this is just your opinion, do you think that perhaps autism is as a condition that other species of animals have, or do you think it's just specific to humans?

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Chris Packham This is a very interesting question and it's one that I ponder all of the time. Obviously, our cognitive ability is quite significantly higher than most other animal species. For a long time we thought that we were the only species that had a consciousness. Now we're not the only species that has a consciousness. And there are other animal species, particularly long lived social animals, things like the cetaceans, elephants, so and so forth, who have great memory, who have the ability to problem solve in ways that are similar to ourselves. They have what we call a sense of self. They recognise themselves as individuals, and that's an enormous asset when it comes to it. Being a long lived social animal, you need to know who you are because you need to know who everyone else is and how they relate to one another. Does autism appear in these creatures? I think there would be a very strong evolutionary argument to suggest that it would be beneficial if it did, because when we typically look at evolution, we call it survival of the fittest. And in very simple terms, the concept is that by species expressing degrees of variation physically when resources are removed or changed or opportunities arise, those members of those species with advantageous physical attributes, and that could be everything from size, it could be colour, it could be song. If, if it were a bird, are able to exploit those new resources or those new opportunities and that species flourishes. But why would it only be beneficial to have physical differences as opposed to mental or even emotional differences? And some recent work has looked at the behavioural expression boldness in young predators. So they've looked at litters of animals as they've been developing, and they've looked at the bolder individuals and they've scored them on a scale of boldness. And then they've looked at how successful they become when they grow to adult hood and what position they hold in the social order of their family or other groups and how good they are at hunting and so on and so forth. So it's clear that that personality expressed at a young age is having a significant impact on the future success of those animals, and sometimes that's breeding success. So I imagine that neurological differences would be enormously beneficial in evolutionary terms, and therefore to suspect that they don't exist, perhaps even in in a way which would be comparable to autism in other species. It would be highly, highly unlikely.

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Jamie Knight Yeah. I think what you're getting at there is there is a neurological diversity, a neurological variability inherent in humanity. So why wouldn't there be a neurological variety and in the rest of the animal world as well?

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Chris Packham Yeah, because it can be advantageous and that neuro, you know, neurological diversity in humans has proved to be advantageous. There have been or you know, there have been times, of course, where people who think differently and have different attributes due to the way that they think have prospered and as a response, our species has also prospered. So I think it it has to be there. Is my dog autistic? I won't be able to tell you that. Is there? You know, the fact that I have two dogs and they express completely different personalities and that impact significantly on how they interact with their world suggests to me that there are clearly neurological differences in my two dogs.

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Jamie Knight And then when we use the word autism, what we're referring to is a specific arbitrary line in the sand, so to speak. Like there is clearly it's describing a thing that exists, but the exact where that line is drawn at any one time depends on the arguments that are being made. It moves around over time. So if we instead of thinking the word autistic as a specific collection of, of diagnostic criteria, so to speak, we say instead, autism is one point of, of a neurodiversity, as they call it. So a neurological diversity, neurological variation. We happen to draw an arbitrary line at this point, but it's not the name of the line that matters. It's the fact that there is a big diversity that it is part of that's part of the bigger picture. Does that make sense?

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Chris Packham Indeed it does. Yeah, I think you're right. And and there were many other aspects of neurology which would not necessarily impact with changes of behavioural traits, but also they would impact on metabolically, physiologically and so on, so forth. So I think that some of that variety has to be there. There's no doubt about that.

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Jamie Knight One of the lenses that I found useful is part of the neurodiversity thing as, a lady called Judy Singer. She talks about it as a lens to think about a neurological majority and a neurological minority and how that sort of mirrors a lot of things like racism and class and things like gay rights and stuff like that, that there is a neurological majority like most people think a certain way, and that introduces barriers that can put people who think in a minority status. So, you know, people who think differently into bad situations because of the barriers, they're kind of made up by the majority. And she sees the neurodiversity argument as a way of labelling that dynamic. Some people then will say, Oh, I'm autistic and therefore I'm neurodivergent. And what they, the way that Judy would put it is you're a member of a neuro minority, whichever one that happens to be. And it's the power dynamic. And I think that's kind of building on that idea, right, that there's a diversity of lots of different types of people, lots of different ways of thinking. And it's about making sure that the majority of that group don't accidentally harm minorities in that group by making assumptions or not being aware of things.

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Chris Packham Because it, because in fundamental terms, I would argue, irrespective of any racial, sexual, political or religious, that we are one species on one planet, and that ultimately that neuro diversity is enormously beneficial to our species.

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Jamie Knight Absolutely.

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Chris Packham So we would act actively seek to protect it if we had any sense.

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Robyn Steward In the first episode of your documentary, you meet Flo, and Flo talks a lot about masking, and I wondered if masking is something that you identify with and if having worked with Flo, if it's something that you're trying to not do, are you trying to unmask or has it not changed you in any way?

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Chris Packham I had to mask for for years and years. Obviously, I grew up in the sixties and seventies as a child and a teenager. And I, you know, lived through the 1980s as a student in order to do what I wanted to do with my life, I had to integrate socially. So when I left university, where I'd been very unsocial as a means of protecting myself, I had to develop a system of self management that would allow me to work with other people, integrate with other people. And I think after my three year holiday doing my undergraduate degree, well, I, you know, didn't interact with anyone or as little as possible. That was quite a challenge. And I set my self-described goals. So I made lists and I would go through that checklist. You know, don't interrupt people, don't finish their sentences. Don't change the topic of conversation when you're bored with what they're talking about, look at them in the eye. They're with a whole list of things that I set myself to do in order to to better mask effectively. And there were some things that I couldn't achieve particularly well. And that was sort of, the some of the environments that we spoke of. So did I go to parties at that time? Yes, I did. I felt compelled to go to them because I didn't have the knowledge. I didn't have therefore the confidence to explain to people why I didn't want to go to a party. So I went to the parties, but I drank enormous amounts of alcohol to a basically obliviate my situation and make it manageable. Obviously, I, I don't go to parties now because I no longer want to drink enormous amounts of alcohol to, to obliviate a situation. So I think that following the diagnosis, although it wasn't immediate, I then began to manage my mask. Would you say that I entirely I wouldn't say entirely unmasked in any professional social situations. Obviously, I do at home sometimes, and even that could be very challenging for the people around me. So it's not something that's easy to switch off because it becomes habitual. I now spend more time, you know, sort of looking at people in the eye and not thinking about it until suddenly I think, Oh, I'm looking at this person, and then I feel very uncomfortable. Whereas in the past I would be constantly thinking, Oh, I'm not looking at that person. I've got to. And those sorts of habits become quite ingrained. And that's beneficial, if I'm very honest with you, because it reduces the amount of energy you have to put into, into manifesting those behaviours. But I still slip up and I think when I the one of the most common slips where I let the mask down now is where I'm talking to people. I'm not very good with small talk, I'm not the slightest bit interested in other people's small talk and that and that can be really difficult in a, in a working environment. And occasionally people will be explaining things to me and I, I know where they're going. I really, I know what they're going to say. And so I would just speed up the process by jumping to the end of their conversation. This rather takes the wind out of their sales and they find that very challenging and insulting. They find it very rude, but I just haven't got time. You know, if the story is too slow, I want to get to the end and move on to the next one. And occasionally when I do that, that's when I sort of well, say occasionally I'll do that quite often. And and I have to sort of stop myself and say, Oh, I won't tell you. Sorry I know what I've just done there. And I, you know, I did that because of... And I wasn't being rude. It was just that I knew what you were going to say and I was getting a bit bored.

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Jamie Knight What you're describing there is sometimes what I think about is the difference between social skills and social smoothness. Like, so if somebody talked to me about something I don't care about, I will often just let them finish. So the conversation smoothly moves to the next thing. Because if I say, Oh, actually I'm not interested in that, suddenly there's a whole nother conversation that's fantastically more complicated. So sometimes I'll, in the interest of smooth flow of conversation, I will just put up with something that I'm not enjoying until it passes. But on the flip side, that's kind of a limit to that as well. So now you're saying about parties and alcohol, I think a lot of our listeners will understand that point. A lot of people have messaged us with that exact experience of alcohol and parties as a combination. Part of finding the balance is sometimes I will put up with something I'm I'm not enjoying or not finding useful or not... or it isn't good because it will pass briefly. But then I also say limit. You know, I won't endure stuff that is extremely bad for very long, so I won't take myself to parties that are not comfortable to me. And it's finding that balancing point that has been quite tricky. And I think as I've so the question I'm coming onto is over the last few years and as I've learnt about myself and learnt about my barriers, my experiences, my kind of identity has changed. I was wondering if you've experienced the same thing, like how has your sense of identity and who you are like evolved since your diagnosis and since the 91Èȱ¬ documentaries you've made before? Because the, the new one has quite a different tone to it?

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Chris Packham Yes is the answer. I have changed my outward characteristics and personality have changed as well. I think initially when I got the diagnosis, it wasn't I didn't think it was tremendously important to me. I'd been living with the condition for, for what will prove to be probably more than half of my life. I'd begun to understand it about ten, twelve years earlier when I was living with a health care professional who talked to me about autism and from letters and notes that I've recovered from that time. I was clearly looking at, well I had started to look at myself and think, well, you know, ring some bells, basically. However, what's interesting is that the small number of people who knew me before the diagnosis and who still know me now say that I changed quite radically. And a lot of it, I think, was to do with what they perceived as outward confidence. So I became more confident to say and explain things to people. Whereas before I would have got upset. I would have avoided the situation. I would have perhaps pussyfooted around in, you know, not not dealing with it head on. And what their take is that within a relatively short space of time, I was just just explaining things to people, saying, this is it. This is what I'm going to do. This is what I'm not going to do. This is why I like to do things.

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Jamie Knight It's one of the ways where a diagnosis can be really useful. So putting aside for a minute the politics side of it, having a diagnosis helps give people a bit more power because having a disability is protected characteristic. There are laws in place, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. So when sometimes and this is some of the obvious principles, if I express something as a personal preference, people treat it as a want. But when I explain something and I take it back to the autism diagnosis from the medical perspective, they understand that it's a need. And that's a subtle difference between what's a want and what's a need. And a lot of people after that diagnosis, gain that confidence, as you exactly have just described, to relay their needs, because internally we've started to understand that actually there's there's a bigger thing here. It's not just a trivial one. It's not a nice to have this is actually something important. And if we can talk to other people about it and we can feel that they're going to listen and respect us, then then we will talk about it. Otherwise you just kind of end up, like you were saying, sort of bouncing along, doing your best, but not really saying what you're thinking because you don't know how people will respond or if they respond well or judge you or whatnot. So one of my questions was you refer to yourself as living with autism, which separates the sense of you from the autism. And a lot of a lot of people prefer that method, you know, person first, I live with autism. Other people see it as part of themselves and they say that they're autistic. Have you had any transition there? Are you kind of moving towards being autistic or basically the way you phrase it, living with autism makes it sound like you see the autism and you as separate, or is that just the wording? You know, do you see it as part of you or a separate from me?

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Chris Packham Okay. So one thing that I'm not aggravated by, nor do I engage with too much is the language that surrounds the condition. And I know from my Twitter feed that people are often very committed to this and they can be quite obsessed by it. And I would say understandably, of course, and this is not a criticism, it's an observation. I'll be very clear about that. They're quite didactic about it. It's not something that I'm drawn to for me in the course of what I'm trying to do, which is communicate my condition to others. So there's a wider understanding of, of, of, of my bit of that. That's the bigger picture.

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Jamie Knight So you come from the perspective that it's a medical condition.

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Chris Packham It's a physiological condition. I will always come at it from a scientific point of view and I'm interested in the science of it, probably secondarily, because I'm no longer a scientist, but if if something, you know, crops up in a popular science journal about autism, then I will read it. I will try and stay on top of the research there. But, but getting back to your answer for me, it's bigger picture stuff. I don't want to get drawn into an argument about the semantics of how we describe our condition.

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Jamie Knight So that's the question. It's like, is it part of you or is it separate?

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Chris Packham Yes.

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Jamie Knight Well, how do you think of that?

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Chris Packham That's it. Well, I suppose there's a resistance. I don't want it to entirely define me as a person. You know, there are other aspects of my character which are, I think, unrelated to the to the condition. But I'm not going to say to you that that's the way it's always going to be, because I do think that I constantly question, you know, how having the condition impacts shapes has, will and currently my life. But at this point in time, you know, I suppose what I'm sorry to say is I retain the right to change my mind based upon the information that I have now and will be given, and also about the fact that, as you have suggested, I constantly reappraise myself, I think that I can be an enjoyable process, it can be a very difficult process. But I constantly reappraise myself because I think that's a very healthy way of constantly finding myself in the world. I have to put myself in this space and time, and in order to do that with the coaches to great effect and comfort. I need to know who I am. So that constant reappraisal is certainly there, I guess initially. And that goes back to answering your question. I wanted to resist being entirely defined by autism. I mean, I think I am entirely autistic, I suppose. But in the past, what I would say to you, my autism doesn't impact on what I eat. My autism doesn't impact on, you know, how I dress. Now, now, I would say that's entirely wrong. My autism impacts quite significantly on what i eat and always has impacted on the way that I dress. So I suppose it's growing an acceptance of the fact that significant parts of my life, outward and inward, are defined by the condition.

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Robyn Steward So a lot of listeners who email us have recently been diagnosed or worked out. They are autistic and they often talk about how much they're learning about themselves. Are there things you've learned over the past few years?

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Chris Packham ÌýIn terms of learning about myself? Yes, a tremendous amount. I think not only through the diagnosis, but since making my first documentary, I've come into contact with a lot of health care professionals, a lot of people who live with autistic people or autistic people themselves. And through those communications, I've been able to ask myself questions. Sometimes I've seen characteristics that were similar. Sometimes I've seen differences. But I've always been a person. I'm quite introspective. I constantly challenge myself and ask questions about myself and what I'm doing and and should I be doing it and is it the best thing to do? That's been quite a painful part of my personality over the years of I'm very honest with you. I'm not and never have been a person that's satisfied with themselves. I don't like Chris Packham very much because I know that Chris Packham could be a better person. But what Chris Packham does is continue to challenge himself and hopefully move in that direction where he becomes a better person and understanding autism through my own eyes and those of others is part and parcel of that process.

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Robyn Steward Thank you.

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Jamie Knight ÌýWonderfully put. Chris, I, I... yes.

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Chris Packham No you're most welcome. Thank you, Robyn, and thank you, Jamie. I really enjoyed talking. It was again, always constructive to to, you know, share minds, share our different minds with one another. So thank you. I really appreciate that.

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Jamie Knight It's been great to learn more about your perspectives, so it's really good. I'll catch you in the future dude. Bye

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Chris Packham Right, cheers. Bye.

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Jamie Knight That's all we have for this episode of 1800 Seconds with Autism. Thank you for listening. If you want to hear more episodes, you can find those on 91Èȱ¬ sounds or wherever you get your podcasts from.

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Robyn Steward ÌýAnd thank you to Chris and the listeners who got in touch. You can always email us at stim@bbc.co.uk. That's S.T.I.M @ bbc.co.uk. We don't always reply, but we do always read them. So from me, Robyn Steward.

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Jamie Knight And me, Jamie Knight. (BOTH) Bye!

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