What Lies Beneath

As part of the process of selling our house, the buyers have commissioned a technical report on the construction and state of the house. So yesterday they turned up with a building engineer in tow whose task it was to examine it from top to bottom.

 

This being Gouda, our house is built on piles, and the way it is constructed means that there is a hollow space underneath the house – totally inaccessible, apart from via a hatch in the garage floor. As part of the inspection, the building engineer raised the hatch and peered down into the pool of water that collects under every house built in this way. He suddenly called us over to take a look. I peered down and saw at first what I thought was a silhouette of two crayfish painted on the concrete base under the water. Just as I was thinking why would anyone bother to paint crayfish on the floor, I suddenly realised that one of the crayfish was moving…

 

Yep, we have freshwater crayfish living under our house. Dunno how they got there, or what they live on, but they seem happy enough. So the next time I need to make Sauce Nantua, I’ll know where to go to get my fresh crayfish…