MEET CLARE

Some people keep their lives in neat rooms. I keep mine in cabinets, drawers and boxes; some stuffed to the gunwales and others completely empty.

​

I'm a journalist and writer. For twenty years I've been collecting things: stories, arguments, receipts, letters, notes and the occasional grudge. I've written for the Guardian, Fox News, The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Sunday Times and the Telegraph, and every Thursday I publish Spilling the Tea via my Substack, where I write with complete liberation.

​

I'm a widow. My late husband, Kai, flew Chinooks for the RAF. Grief taught me to read institutions the way you read a suspect: closely, and without their permission. Some of my hardest truths were born out of his untimely and unnecessary death.

​

But this isn't a website about loss. It's about curiosity — the thing that outlasts everything else. I live in Wiltshire with my partner Pete, his boxer Maya, two grown-up children who need me less, and two nonchalant cats, Cookie the fat moggy and Neffi, the feral Maine Coon.

​

Somewhere between widowhood, menopause, watching my children grow up, falling in love again and buying a caravan, I stopped asking permission. Spilling the Tea is where I tell other women they can stop too.