Clare Mackintosh

Over the last few years I have accumulated quite a cache of drugs. Nothing wildly out of the ordinary, just an array of prescription painkillers with a sprinkling of sleeping tablets thrown in for good measure. Most of the packets were out of date and several were untouched so I thought it wise to get […]

Just because I subscribe to the Gestapo approach to motherhood doesn’t mean that I’m totally immune to the occasional bout of Accidental Parenting. Accidental parenting refers to all those times when a lapse of good intentions create a habit so ingrained you never succeed in reversing it.  The children who can’t go to sleep unless […]

“They’ve vanished – every single pair.” We’re going away for a weekend wedding and my husband is tearing around the house looking for a pair of pants. There is not a single pair to be found anywhere. “The nanny must have taken them.” “Don’t be ridiculous – why on earth would the nanny take them?” […]

Supermarket shopping has got easier since the days when I was hounded by security staff for trolley abuse, and now I quite enjoy walking up and down the aisles with the pygmies in tow. So, the cupboards bare, I throw the kids in the car after work and decamp to the small Sainsbury’s in town […]

We’re an hour into the stationary tail-back. The M40 snakes back through South Oxfordshire; an inert mass of cars filled with would-be shoppers. You know it’s bad when people start getting out of their cars, sitting on the hard shoulder with make-shift picnics and swapping numbers with the family in the Touran next to them. […]

Yesterday the Husband and I seized the moment and had sex in the kitchen. This is not the first time it has happened there; it’s not that there’s anything particularly erotic about our kitchen, simply that we tend to be in there at the same time, which is a rarity nowadays. Half-way through (not that […]