In Depth:  Rachel Jones

Rachel Jones

I don’t know when we reached peak Advent calendar. Maybe it was 2021, in a fit of post-Covid desperation.

Whenever it was, it doesn’t seem to show any signs of abating. They are, as one newspaper round-up put it, ‘as much a staple in the run-up to Christmas as drinking too much and listening to Last Christmas for the 1,237th time.’ A cursory look at the John Lewis website reveals a wealth of options – you can, among other things, spend £160 on a ‘Dazzle and Glow’ beauty Advent calendar, or £25 on one with a month’s worth of pork scratchings. Take your pick.

Rachel Jones

Last night I got back from a work trip to The Gospel Coalition’s Women’s Conference.

Over 8,500 of our American sisters gathered in Indianapolis for three days of teaching, worship and fellowship. For me, it was three days of author meetings, networking, and interacting with customers at the The Good Book Company stand. (As luck would have it, the US Olympic swim team trials were happening in the very same square mile, although out on the street it was pretty easy to guess who was there to see what, based on what they were carrying: signed swim float or stuffed book tote.)

Rachel Jones

With Spring almost sprung, it’s high time for small talk to turn to travel: ‘Are you going away this year?’ The real question, though, is are you going alone? 2024 is, according to Forbes magazine, the year of the solo traveller. The Association of British Travel Agents reported that 16% of trips booked last year were solo – up from 6% in 2011 – and the trend looks likely to continue.

I have one old friend who is a serial solo-tripper. He waxes lyrical about the ease of travelling on his own: he can decide where he wants to go, how long he wants to stay there, what to eat, and when. A recent article in The Guardian celebrating the rise of the older female solo traveller picked up on many of the same benefits: ‘It’s a midweek morning and I’ve just woken up in a hotel room in Madrid on the first day of a mini-break. The day stretches deliciously ahead: shall I go first to the Prado, or the Reina Sofía museum? Shall I have brunch and a late-afternoon main meal, or tapas here and there? … The fact is, I can do exactly what I want, when I want, because I’m holidaying alone.’

Rachel Jones

I have a friend who once told me that, in the course of daily life, she frequently imagines what it would be like to be a medieval peasant. We all have our quirks, I guess.

Sometimes she makes the comparison in order to make her feel better about life now, as a kind of internal pep talk: ‘Think life is hard? Think how much harder it would be if you were a medieval peasant!’ Other times the comparison is more negative: ‘Life would be much simpler if I were a medieval peasant.’ Fewer decisions to make and a lot less to do, at least at this time of year: medieval winter is surely just a case of looking at an empty field and hoping your supply of turnips or whatever lasts you until Spring. No Sunday School nativity plays or ‘Oh help, it’s Christmas jumper day tomorrow’ moments.

Rachel Jones

Ok, I’ll admit it: I’m excited for the Barbie Movie. 

That’s right: in what promises to be the film of the summer, Mattel’s classic doll is being given the cinema treatment. As I write the soundtrack is already all over the radio. Directed by Greta Gerwig, and starring Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken, the trailer promises that ‘if you love Barbie, this is for you’, and that ‘if you hate Barbie, this is for you.’ Since that encompasses just about any woman millennial or older, the filmmakers are on to a winner. 

Rachel Jones

I don’t know what it reveals about the state of the world, or the state of my soul, that I consider not looking at my phone on the tube to somehow be virtuous, but I do. It is, at the very least, good for my neck. And my eyes – and those need all the help they can get. So instead, I examine the posters.

A new series of ads issued by Transport For London have particularly caught my ailing eyes. They aim to address the very serious issue of sexual harassment on public transport, with suggestions for how members of the public can help. Here’s one:

Rachel Jones

‘Now then, what am I going to write an en column about?’

It’s a repeated refrain in my house. Dissatisfied with my flatmate’s answers, I cast the net wider. I ask friends. Colleagues. College acquaintances. My mother. I’m drawing a blank.

Rachel Jones

If you’re reading this in December, it’s likely that whatever I’m doing right now, I’m thinking about one thing, and one thing only: the Sunday School Christmas play.

In fact, as I write this it’s still October and already I’m a woman consumed. It’s not just the performing and the rehearsing and the hyping (to the children). Part of what makes the obsession so protracted is that I have somehow ended up backing myself into the position of writing the scripts from scratch each year.

Rachel Jones

Netflix reportedly lost a million subscribers in the second quarter of this year as the cost of living crisis bit – but so far I’m hanging in there. I came for Stranger Things 4. I stayed for the second season of my ultimate guilty pleasure: Indian Matchmaking.

It’s a reality show in which Mumbai-based matchmaker Sima Taparia – ‘Sima Aunty’ to her clients– travels across India and the US, making matches for wealthy singletons. Each episode follows a similar pattern. We see successful and glamorous men and women in their 30s living their best life – drinks with friends, sessions in the park with their personal trainer, tours of their chicken-farm machinery business – before they admit to camera that they’d really like to meet that special someone.

Rachel Jones

In many ways, it was just like my church life group. A dozen or so men and women sat together of an evening in one of their homes.

Laughing. Eating. Pulling each other’s legs. The conversation flowing among the group as a whole and then ebbing into separate discussions in twos and threes. A few kids on screens somewhere else in the house, occasionally appearing… It all felt familiar somehow. At home.

Rachel Jones

There are a lot of pregnant women in my life.

This is bad news, inasmuch as before there are babies, there are almost inevitably baby showers (*shudder*). But this is good news, because the announcement of a pregnancy provides a source of conversational fodder that rivals the weather in terms of mileage: baby names. This can be discussed endlessly both with the parents-to-be and – even more fun, to be honest – without them.

Rachel Jones

Today was a good day. Why? Wordle in three.

Yes, I’ve joined the bandwagon. A little late – as always.

Rachel Jones

Valentine’s Day. If those two words are a bit of an emotional massacre for you, don’t worry – this column concerns a literal one instead.

The St Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 belongs in that category of ‘events from the GCSE History curriculum that have indelibly lodged in my brain’, ready and waiting to be deployed at a pub quiz one day – or indeed, an en article.

Rachel Jones

Since my last en column I’ve had the dubious pleasure of appearing on a national TV gameshow.

I think I’ve mostly got away with it where I live. While my parents in Lancashire have had numerous comments from parishioners about ‘their Rachel’s’ inglorious foray into TV stardom, down here in Surrey it has remained, much to my relief, mostly incognito. But, to quote Rico Tice quoting John Stott quoting someone else whose name I have forgotten, one ought to be prepared to ‘rejoice in one’s humiliations’. (Plus, I’ll be honest with you, I’m two days past this column’s deadline and scrambling for content.)

Rachel Jones

The lifting of coronavirus restrictions over the summer months has made church life feel refreshingly more normal.

Singing is back. Sunday school is back. Perhaps you’ve even been the happy recipient of that greatest of golden tickets – the invitation to Sunday lunch. That said, if you’ve spent the last 18 months munching through the entire contents of Netflix, it’s possible that your conversational skills are a little rusty. What was it that people used to talk about? But fear not. Here to save you from stilted small talk, let me introduce you to a favourite conversational pastime that I like to call The Island Game. The scenario you pose as you pass the roasted spuds across the dinner table is this: you’re going to be stranded on a desert island for a year (maybe two). You will be rescued, but you need to survive until you are. You can take five fellow church members with you. Who are you going to pick?

Rachel Jones

I can’t be the only person for whom half the pleasure of the Olympic Games is in reminiscing about previous Olympic Games.

What happened, and where we were and who we were with when it did. ‘Can you remember that time when… ?’ ‘Ah yes, we were on holiday in Cornwall the year that…’ ‘Was that 1992 or 1996?’ And so on.

Rachel Jones

We need to talk about periods. After all, everyone else is.

Ok, so I’ll admit that having just published a book on the subject, my search history has probably skewed the algorithms of my news feeds.

Rachel Jones

The Transport Secretary Grant Schapps’ advice that it was ‘too soon’ for people to start booking summer holidays in February, either in the UK or abroad, came six weeks too late for my family.

Surely no government can cancel Christmas and not expect middle-aged women across the country to immediately start planning their next opportunity to fulfil every mother’s dream: Having All their Grown-up Children In One Place and Everyone Having a Lovely Time (or at least, trying to).

Rachel Jones

It was over dinner that my housemate broached the controversial subject: ‘How would you guys feel if I got an Xbox?’

‘Oh I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I’ve heard they’ve put a lot of strain on people’s marriages during Covid.’

Rachel Jones

‘And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?’ Not a lot this year, actually. Getting things ‘done’ ceased to be the object from about March onwards in favour of just getting through. So here we are, ‘another year over’, with less than ever to show for it. Goodness knows what my mother’s obscure relations are going to put in their Christmas letters this year. Here’s hoping some second cousins thrice removed somewhere have managed to pass their Grade 3 Piano exam to give us all some good news.

But John Lennon’s is not the only Christmas song that will be sounding a little different this year. (Top marks if you recognise where they’re all from.*) ‘Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose’ as you sit on your coats on the patio in your Tier Two area. ‘I really can’t stay…’ ‘But baby it’s cold outside…’ ‘I know, but if I come inside that will push us over the rule of six.’ ‘I’m driving home for Christmas, oh I can’t wait to see those faces’ through the kitchen window. ‘Oh I say it’s tough, I have had enough, can you stop the virus please?’

Rachel Jones

‘These are difficult times when there’s not that much good news. And I think this is one of those things that is universally good. No matter where you are on planet Earth, this is a universally good thing.’

Those words were delivered earlier this summer. So quick quiz (without cheating and looking down this column for answers): who said them, and about what?

Rachel Jones

Whatever our situation, we’re all in the process of working out how to thrive in the ever-changing, but never-quite-as-much-as-we’d-like, ‘new normal’. And it strikes me that, for single Christians, there are particular challenges.

Granted, most of this summer’s weddings have been cancelled – at least, those of any size. That may be a pro or a con, depending on whether you view weddings as the most fun a person can have on a Saturday, or more like an all-day endurance sport event.

Rachel Jones

We were four weeks into lockdown, and I had never felt more of an extrovert. The move to home working, the sudden contraction of my social life, the complete absence of church activities, and the impromptu decampment to my parents’ house meant that – like most people – my world had shrunk dramatically.

The condition of being generally under-stimulated soon left me feeling flat; not quite myself; running at less than 100%. And that’s when I had one of those dawning moments of realisation. Maybe this was something akin to how my more introverted friends felt when life is ‘normal’ – too often generally over-stimulated, and therefore operating at less than 100%.