Dumped, Actually(48)

Strange and head-scratching coincidences that might seem important at the time, but in actual fact have no impact on your life whatsoever.

But then there’s the one-in-ten case that actually does have a massive effect on your life; and for me – at least in recent times – that’s only resulted in bad news all round. Without what I thought was ‘serendipity’, I wouldn’t have been stuck at a theme park with a bogey wiped down my nose.

Given all of this, I tend to ignore coincidence as much as I possibly can, especially the sort that looks like serendipity. Nothing good can come from it. I’ve learned that lesson.


Finding appropriate feedback from my audience is not as easy as I’d like it to be. I get hundreds of responses from the continuing run of ‘Dumped Actually’ stories I’m writing, but there’s actually not a lot of them I can turn into the next story.

I get a lot of emails and social media messages that are either congratulating me on the feature, or taking the piss out of me for all of my mishaps. I still get an unhealthy amount of pornographic pictures of Bambi in my inbox every week. I don’t know what’s more disturbing, the fact that I keep getting sent them, or that there are people out there making so many of them in the first place.

I’ve also started getting an awful lot of men contacting me, asking me to pass on their phone numbers or social media profiles to Vanity. I ignore all of these, of course. They think she’s just an object of sexual desire, but I know she’s actually a real, living, breathing human being, who still needs time to heal.

Of course, I am also continuing to get a lot of people contacting me with their suggestions on how to get over Samantha. Most of them run along similar themes: Get drunk. Go on holiday. Shag somebody else. Move away. Etc., etc. All of these are fine – and I’ve even tried a couple of them already – but my journalist’s nose does not twitch when I read any of them.

It’s come to the point where writing a good story for ‘Dumped Actually’ is as important to me as getting over Samantha. I don’t know when this happened, but it’s definitely the case now. My desire to distract myself from heartbreak has been joined by my desire to fill out three to five thousand words with some quality storytelling. Of course, this is a distraction from the heartbreak in and of itself.

Or at least it would be, if I could actually pin down some suggestions from the punters out there that I could go and experience for another write-up.

I’ve bounced a few of them off Wimsy, to see what he thinks of them. I’m finding that underneath all that misery and self-pity, my new friend has an extremely sharp mind. This is proving very useful, as it’s always nice to have someone to chat to about these things.

He agreed with me that nearly all of them weren’t worth exploring, though, more’s the pity.

So, at the moment I only have three ideas that seem like they could turn into something I can use for more material. Sadly, one of them is right out, as it involves confronting Samantha about the reasons why she dumped me. This is not happening. Never in a million years. I will masturbate in front of an entire herd of fallow deer before I do that.

Then we have Lizzy Moore’s idea of doing a bit of mindfulness. This sounds like so much new-age blather to me, so that one gets shoved to the bottom of the pile as well . . . for the moment.

This leaves Ahmed’s proposal that I bury myself in my work and win the approval of my peers and seniors.

Sadly, I feel like I’m already doing this.

‘Dumped Actually’ continues to be a massive success. Actual Life’s subscriber numbers are still climbing – even though they’ve levelled out a bit, as all things do after the initial rush.

I am still popular with my peers around the office, although I’m starting to detect a little jealousy emanating from some of them – particularly Helen, who writes lifestyle features like mine, and is probably cursing the fact that she has a happy marriage with a wonderful man called Mark.

Erica is also very pleased with what I’m doing. She was absolutely delighted with the story about Vanity – not just because she found the whole Super Mario thing hilarious, but because she was impressed with the way I portrayed Vanity (or Charity, for the purposes of the story).

‘That girl has a lot going on, underneath all that make-up and breast augmentation,’ Erica told me. ‘Sometimes I think people like her just get lost in the pressures of that social scene. I only think she turns up to yoga because it fits the lifestyle she thinks she needs to have. Everyone has to be gorgeous and perfect all of the time. It doesn’t leave much room for being a flawed, interesting human being. It was a pleasure to see that side of her, and lovely that you were so nice to her.’

Vanity adored the article as well. She called me the day it came out and told me that she loved me for it. Which was very nice.


So, the last thing I wrote for ‘Dumped Actually’ has been a success all round. Which now makes it even harder to top it with the next feature – hence my stress and anxiety over picking a subject worthy of the follow-up.

I’m sat chewing on a knuckle at my desk, trying my hardest to think of a way I can take Ahmed’s suggestion on board (and failing completely) when my office phone rings, and that awful serendipity thing I was talking about comes a-calling.

‘Hello?’

‘Ah . . . is this Oliver Sweet?’ The voice on the other end of the phone is deep, baritone and speaks of supreme self-confidence, self-belief and possibly self-love.