Writing Style - Changed Over the Years
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 the prose hasn't yet learned to do.
The format in 2016 is strictly functional: a heading for each topic, a few sentences under each, next topic. Building works. Walking. The boat. The weather. It reads like a well-intentioned newsletter rather than a blog. The writing is warm but cautious — there is a sense of a man trying to work out how much of himself to put in.
"I remind myself that I started writing this for my daughter Cheryl and my other Aussie kids and grandkids — as some sort of curious memento that might be read in the future."
The audience is clearly imagined as family. Politics and opinion are largely avoided — Mum said not to. Personal feeling is present but kept brief. The real Ken flashes through in asides and brackets, but the main text keeps its distance.
2017 – 2018
Growing Confidence — Longer Titles, Bigger Ideas
By 2017, something has loosened. The post titles become more playful and literary — "Nostalgia Isn't What it Used to Be", "The World of Frank", "Wallowing in Winter", "All the Lonely People". These are not summaries of content; they are invitations. The writer is starting to enjoy himself.
The structure softens too. Topics no longer demand their own subheadings — thoughts flow from one to the next more naturally. The brackets and asides multiply, and they are where much of the best writing lives. A parenthetical observation about the Dutch language, a flash of self-deprecating humour about bookkeeping, a quote from a podcast — these small insertions give the writing its personality.
"(Does that sound like whinging? — Good! — I think I will for a while!)"
2018 brings a new depth. The loss of a care client in a house fire produces the shortest, starkest post in the entire decade: barely a paragraph, ending simply with "one of our boys." It is the first sign that Ken is willing to let the weight of something sit on the page without explaining it away. The writing has earned that trust.
The post titles also start doing something new — they introduce a topic before the body reveals what it actually means. "Swallows and Floating Horses". "The Hatfields and McCoys". "The Russian Bear, a German Wolf, and a Koala." The reader has to come in to find out.
2019 – 2020
Loss, Lockdown and a Wider Lens
2019 is a year of quiet grief. Janny's father Hendrik — "Heit" — dies in April, and the posts around that time are among the most tender in the blog. Ken writes carefully and with great restraint, as if aware of the limits of what words can do. "A good life and a good man" is all he says, and it is enough.
The topics widen. Alongside the farm and the boat, Ken starts writing more about Dutch society — euthanasia, rising right-wing politics, the refugees system, the language barrier in tax returns. The outsider's perspective, always present, becomes more explicitly a lens through which the Netherlands is examined rather than just lived in.
Then COVID arrives in March 2020 and changes everything. The blog responds immediately — hand-washing stations, 1.5-metre rules, testing, isolation — but what is striking is that the tone doesn't panic. If anything, the posts become more reflective. Locked down, with fewer external events to report, the writing turns inward. This is the year that produces some of the most philosophical passages in the whole decade.
"I find this on the BBC somewhere: 'The mundane things you document are the details that add up to a full life, what it was like to be alive right then.' And so to 2020!"
The number of outside sources quoted — BBC articles, DutchNews.nl, podcasts, John P. Weiss — increases sharply. Ken is reading more widely and bringing it back to the page. The blog is no longer just a record of what happened; it is a place where things are thought through.
2021 – 2022
The Essay Emerges — Climate, Crisis and Reflection
By 2021, the structure of the "weekly bulletin" has all but disappeared. Posts no longer have subheadings for each topic. Instead, a single thread runs through — or several threads are woven together — in proper paragraphs. This is recognisably essay writing, even if Ken would not call it that.
Climate change becomes a major preoccupation. Not as a news item but as something personal — the changing seasons visible from the same spot on the same walk, the Dutch flood defences seen with new eyes, the peat drying under the fields. The global is felt locally, and the writing is better for it.
"I've been doing a lot of reading about global warming — apparently, we shouldn't use the misleading term 'climate change' as it was only dreamed up by a Republican trying to soften the implications."
2022 brings the Russia-Ukraine war and the energy crisis — and Ken writes about both with a directness that would have been unusual in 2016. The self-imposed rule about politics has quietly eroded. The posts now carry opinions, clearly labelled as such, alongside the news. Gas prices, European security, Dutch nitrogen policy — these sit comfortably next to the pumpkin update and the boat maintenance log.
The podcast references multiply. Ken is an active, critical reader and listener — and the blog has become the place where the week's reading meets the week's living.
2023 – 2024
The Renovation Years — and a Richer Interior Life
The 2023–2024 house renovation dominates two years of posts — floor heating, insulation, walls coming down, months living in the apartment. But something else is happening at the same time. The posts become noticeably more philosophical about ageing. Not anxiously — more with a kind of interested curiosity, as if ageing is a subject worth studying.
"Now that I'm 'nearly 80', I wonder if it's an old people thing — trying to get rid of clutter?"
References to mortality appear more often — not darkly, but naturally, as part of the texture of life. The Lichtjes Avond (candle evening for the dead) is described with real feeling. A post about a judge who never found time to write in his journal lands with unusual weight. The Lizzie Letters are mentioned more frequently, and with more urgency — the sense that writing it all down, before it is too late, matters.
The writing in 2024 is the most fluent in the entire decade. Sentences are longer and more confident. The jokes land better. The movement between a plumbing job and a reflection on Dutch history and a quote from The Economist has become completely natural — the blog has found its own logic, which is the logic of a curious mind moving freely through a week.
2025 – 2026
A Writer Who Knows What He Is Doing
By 2025, the blog is ten years old and Ken knows it. The anniversary prompts genuine reflection on why he writes — and the writing is richer for that self-awareness. Poems appear (Emily Brontë, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow). The AI-assisted history of the Turf Route and the Eysinga family show a new willingness to research and write at length on subjects that interest him.
The voice in 2025–2026 is warmer and more open than 2015–2016, but also quieter. There is less to prove. The anxious question from the first post — "is there anyone who actually cares?" — has long since been answered, and the writing reflects that ease. Posts begin with a description of the Sunday morning itself — the fire going, Boeke underfoot, tea on the desk — as if to say: this is the ritual, and the ritual matters.
"It occupies a couple of hours on a Sunday morning, but it also means that I think about things during the preceding week — those 'count your blessings' moments, or something unnamed."
The 2026 posts, still coming, show no sign of slowing. If anything they are more assured — reaching further back into memory, quoting more poetry, more comfortable with silence and space on the page. The writer who started out wondering if Wijnjewoude was interesting enough has long since realised that the place was never really the point.
At a Glance — What Changed
Then and Now — The Same Writer, Ten Years Apart
2015 — First post
Opens by questioning whether the blog is worth doing
Subheadings for every topic
Keeps opinions to himself
Audience: family only
Worried about repeating himself
Photos carry most of the weight
2025 — Tenth year
Opens with a description of Sunday morning itself
No subheadings — thoughts flow freely
Shares opinions with confidence
Audience: family, friends, and himself
Comfortable returning to the same ideas
Words carry most of the weight
This analysis was produced by Claude AI, reading all 526 posts of This Week in Wijnjewoude in sequence and tracking changes in style, structure, tone and subject matter across the decade. The interpretation is Claude's, but every observation is grounded in the actual text.
Ken Copeland writes This Week in Wijnjewoude from De Twa Buken, Wijnjewoude, Friesland, the Netherlands.
This Week in Wijnjewoude · De Twa Buken · Wijnjewoude, Friesland
Inspired by the Lizzie Letters of 1895 · Written for the family in Australia
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