You know, I love my neighbourhood. We have only lived here for a year and it already has most of everything we want: a beautiful park, a corner shop where the owner smiles when you walk in, its on a hill so you get some perspective, lots of families and life on the street, a sense of community, a local hall for yoga, a pub with real ale and wheat beer on tap. Heck, the aspirational middle classes have to live somewhere.
Something I love to do is notice what goes on under your feet or over your head. The wood for the trees. And something I have been noticing is chewing gum: this stuff is everywhere. And its really hard to get off. I remember as a kid stories of my older sister peeling it off the footpath and recycling it. At that time, this struck me as genius as it broke the capitalist circuit route, plus she was helping the environment, and also probably boosting her immune system to boot.
Chewing Gum is EVERYWHERE. I cannot pretend that I know the history of the stuff, although I am sure its fascinating. Its not food, but you chew it like tobacco, and you should definitely NOT swallow it because it has been scientifically PROVEN to exist in your intestine for 50 years.
My affair with gum stopped mostly after all the phenylalanine got involved in the recipe and was told it gave you cancer. I have a distinction between 'chewing' and 'bubble', as distinct genres of chewable mouth sweet.
Take a look the next time you are in a built up area or even if not, the smooth palette of the concrete or paving will inevitably be broken up, pointillist style, by randomly spaced varying shades of grey though to beige, irregular circles that dot the landscape like way-markers across 2 dimensions.
FURTHER READING:
Madrid Council tackles the stickiness of gum:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/chewing-gum-spanish-government
History of Chewing Gum:
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