FOR as long as there is chewing gum, Dennis will never be out of work. A cheerful mountain of a man, working for a Portsmouth firm, Gum Clearer with his three mates, he said they were in the city to again remove the unsightly stuff from Gloucester Green.

They were hard pressed. Once there had been six in the gang, but two quit at Christmas; the work could be mind-numbing.

Armed with high-powered sprays, they bombarded offending patches with chemicals and steam at 180C, turning the gum to powder.

Such is the demand for their services, they could be booked in Oxford for only one day. Wednesday would find them in Stoke and Thursday, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Introducing elementary statistics, Dennis reckoned that even if chewing gum ceased to be – which it won’t – the clearing up operation nationwide would take more than 50 years. A career opportunity or a life sentence?

FINGERS and ears were suffering. Even the hardest types were plunging hands into pockets as they walked along a freezing Queen Street.

The pair of expensive-looking gloves, lying on the wall above the bike racks by the Halifax at the Westgate Centre must surely have been missed by their owner. Someone must have been in a hurry to forget them.

They were observed with various degrees of interest. Several people stopped, looked at the gloves before checking to see who was watching, as if fighting temptation. Others sniffed at what they saw as litter.

One teenage lad tried them on, but returned them to the wall when chastised by his female companion.

Seeing the gloves, an elderly woman realised her hands were bare and delved into a shopping bag to produce a multi-coloured pair which she put on. A middle-aged man, in smart overcoat, picked them up, sniffed and quickly dropped them, distaste across his chiselled features. A small lad, unhappy at being out shopping with his grandparents, threw the gloves to the ground only to be told to put them back by a stern grandfather. This observation of human nature lasted 15 minutes.

IN fact I might still have been there had a tall man with bulging eyes not asked the way to Market Street. He was a stranger in town.

I intended to go that way and said I would be happy to accompany him. It gave me the opportunity to point out various places of interest en route. But he showed little interest. I asked what he was looking for in Market Street; there was an excellent cafe, the Covered Market, a cycle shop that had featured in an episode of Lewis, as well as a fancy dress shop.

“I want the gents lavatory,” he said. “The one below the Westgate Centre is closed. Can we hurry, please?”

I returned to the Westgate Centre an hour later. The gloves had gone. Perhaps their owner had retrieved them. On the other hand, perhaps not.