The Poet's Tale

I was showing the cover of Suburban Pastoral to Biff Smith (of the excellent band the Starlets, who supported The Daintees in Glasgow), when a poet came up and heard my story about the chewing-gum painter, Ben Wilson, whom I had commissioned to paint the little lawnmower picture on a blob of squashed chewing gum on the pavement.
He told us that as a boy in Glasgow, he and his friend used to pick the dried chewing gum off the pavement and by gnashing it with a lot of little chews on their back teeth, they could revive whatever minty flavour was left. If one of them had something to do, the other would store his gum under his upper lip for him to keep it soft, meanwhile carrying on his own chewing activity in the main mouth.
Apparently once his friend, while storing his gum for him in this way, had been offered the rare treat of a handful of peanuts by a pal round the corner, which he scoffed in delight.
So when he handed the chewing gum back, it was studded with tiny fragments of chewed up peanut.