Claire is Calum's and Jamie's mother.
Claire was born in Piltown, County Kilkenny in the Republic
of Ireland, one of a pair of twins (the other being Desmond).
As a youngster, Claire attended Piltown National School.
As a part of her studies she had to learn Irish, which she absolutely hated. For a long time she kept getting Dessy
to ask their Irish teacher on her behalf for permission to go to the toilet, being incredibly shy. The teacher
on one particular occasion told her she would have to ask herself if she needed to go - rather than do this, Claire ended
up wetting herself - one of her earliest memories - and was dragged home by her sister Lucy to get changed! Ever after that,
she was forced to ask to go to the loo in Gaelic, and despite nearly fourteen years of tuition in Irish, this remains the
only sentence she can remember in Irish to this day - "An bhfuil cead agam a dhul amach, maith 's e do thoil
e"!!
Another incident Claire remembers as a toddler was when
a coal lorry reversed over the tricycle she was riding, slightly hurting her in the process. It was her brother Paul's tricycle,
and he apparently was not too happy about it!
A further memory Claire has of her primary school
is of an injury she sustained in the playground whilst playing camogie (similar to Scottish camanach or shinty). She
ended up off school for six weeks, having sustained a facial injury, and was delighted because she ended up only able to eat
ice cream for most of that duration! Claire's interest in
camogie continued competitively until the age of 21, playing for Piltown Camogie Club between the ages of
8 and 16, Carrick-on Suir Camogie Club between 16 and 18, and Bristol Camogie Club between
19 and 21. And if hat wasn't enough, the accident prone Claire also had her face accidentally smashed on the green in front
of the houses at Hillcrest by neighbour Caroline Long!
Claire later went to a secondary school in Carrick-on-Suir in neighbouring
County Tipperary, called the Scoil Mhuire, in Greenhill, and then went to the Vocational
Technical School in Carrick from the age of 17 to 18.
Claire moved to Bristol to join her elder sisters Lucy and
Celia, where she took up work with the Royal Liver Assurance Company. In 1993, at the age of 21, she went
on a tour around the world with her Lucy, visiting America, Hawaii, Fiji, Australia (where
she stayed for six months in Perth with her sister Anita), Thailand and India.
Upon her return to Bristol in 1994, and having just taken up work with the Avon
Gorge Nursing Home, Claire was involved in a serious accident whilst riding her bicycle, colliding with a car in Clifton.
She broke her left foot and suffered facial injuries, which took several months to heal.
Back on her feet again, Claire took up work shortly after with Ernst and Young
(a company she continued to work for until October 2003, when she was unfortunately made redundant after a reorganisation
of the company's finance operations).
Things soon began to look up in 1995, when she
met her future husband Chris Paton, son of Royal Navy submariner Colin Paton and Charlotte Harper Graham, in an ASDA
supermarket in which she was working - the exact meeting spot was the toilet roll aisle! The couple moved into a flat together in the Totterdown area of the city about six months later,
and shortly after, in September 1997, both moved to Scotland, where they have lived ever since.
In Scotland, Claire continued to work for Ernst and
Young, and gained an HNC in Accounting at the Glasgow College of Commerce in 1999. On June 24th 2000, she and Chris finally
married in her home village of Piltown, at the Church of Assumption, and spent their honeymoon in Galway and the Aran
Islands.
On November 25th 2000, Claire gave birth to a son, Calum
Graham Paton, who continues to torment them on a daily basis! Two years later, both she and Chris relocted from Glasgow
to the west coast seaside town of Largs in North Ayrshire, and on November 29th 2004, she gave birth to her second wee terror,
Jamie Christopher Paton.
Claire continues to live in Largs, and works today as an assistant accountant at
T. H. Fergusson & Co in the nearby village of Fairlie.
