Zandzoom

There is a piece of ground that includes our house, Jan's menagerie and Tinekes Garden, destined possibly to become a part of a huge housing estate called Zandzoom. The Heiloo Local Council has plans which include taking over a lot of local land, but they have failed to disposess enough owners, and have found a lot of contamination in ground that they have taken over. The project is tottering a little. This is actually the reason we bought this house. The council placed an injunction on the place which dictated that Opa Sprenkeling could only sell his assets to his children or the council. On his passing, the council could engulf it all. At 82, the succession looked dodgy, so sold to his children it was, in bits. Other pieces of ground taken by the Council have just fallen fallow, in a state of limbo awaiting the bulldozers. Last chance for any archeological research.

Thus on Monument Day, the day on which all museums etc are open to the public for free, we were enticed by local advertistments to Zandzoom for a cultural rebirth and to be informed about the wonderful things from the past that had been unearthed by local archeologists. It was a little sparse to say the least. A miniature stonehenge made of firewood that was itself a reproduction of something that had been found somewhere else. A plaster cast of the skeleton of a dog that had been found here and may have been 2500 years old. And a wooden spoon, obviously new, that was in a hole in the ground, which marked the spot where a wooden spoon had really been found. Or something.

The high spot was the cinema, a container fitted out with 1930's decor, sloping floor to accomodate about three rows of four or five real cinema seats. A red carpet and a tasselled rope barrier to keep back the crowds and the photographers when the stars came for a premiere. It was beautiful, a real gem. We went in and saw a film about all the things that had been found here. Some stones which, not surprisingly, were from the stone age. And two small pieces of earthenware from the bronze period which, the film assured us, posed the interesting question as to whether they came from the same pot, or from two different pots. We shall be wrestling with this poser for quite some time I said to Bernadet as we mounted our electric bicycles to return home.