SummariesTWIW2026

  This Week in Wijnjewoude · Analysis How the Blog Changed — A Decade of Writing Tracking style, tone and topics from 2015 to 2026 · 526 posts Reading all 526 posts in sequence reveals something that would be hard to notice week by week: a writer gradually finding his voice, widening his gaze, and — as the years pile up — becoming more comfortable with the bigger questions. What started as a nervous weekly bulletin became something closer to a personal essay. This is the story of how that happened. 2015 – 2016 Finding the Format — "Is there anyone who actually cares?" The first post, in October 2015, opens with a question that doubles as an anxiety: "Just an idea — can I keep it up? Is there enough that actually happens in Wijnjewoude for a weekly update? And most importantly, is there anyone who actually cares?" The early posts are noticeably tentative — short, structured around bullet-point lists of weekly happenings, heavy with photos that do much of the work th...

  Ten years of weekly blogs · Wijnjewoude Jacoba  Hull circa 1900. Still going. I've been going back through ten years of these blogs (with help from Claude) and one of the things that comes up, week after week, is the boat. Not always in a big way — sometimes just a mention that she's been winterised, or that I've been varnishing the wooden bits, or that we didn't get away this weekend because of the kids or the bookkeeping or the weather. But she's always there. So I thought I'd try to put it all together. What follows is more or less the story of Jacoba — the mishaps, the good moments, the things I had to fix, and why, after fifteen years, I still can't quite bring myself to sell her. How it started We Weren't Actually Looking For Her In 2009, friends of ours — Ivan and Louise — had friends who were looking to buy a boat in Friesland. Andrew and Terry, from Australia. I ended up helping them look around, which mostly meant driving to various yacht hav...