Of course, their kindness towards one another extended to me as well, and I had what you would describe as an idyllic upbringing – surrounded by, and included in, all the love I could possibly wish for. Most of my childhood memories consist of me running around the incredibly beautiful sun-dappled garden they created together – laughing and giggling as I jumped over the geraniums, with them watching me from the patio with indulgent smiles on their faces.
Yes. It is enough to make you sick just thinking about it, isn’t it?
When you have parents who are as emotionally available as mine were, it tends to rub off on you. I’ve never had trouble expressing or understanding my feelings, thanks to them.
I was pretty much a hopeless romantic myself by the time I reached adulthood. While a lot of my mates were off watching action and horror movies, I preferred to sit down in front of something by Richard Curtis.
I kept quiet about my love of romantic movies, as you would expect. The epic taking of the piss by all of my male friends would have been long, sustained and probably quite unpleasant.
In fact, the first time I ever really expressed my love for films like Four Weddings and Love Actually was when I wrote the speculative article that got me the job here at Actual Life. The fact it became a pretty popular read on the website meant that I wasn’t the only bloke out there who didn’t mind a bit of romance in his life.
Once I’ve provided the brief background about my upbringing, I start detailing my first break-up, and the words begin to spill out of me in a torrent. If you’re going to clean out a wound, it’s best to do it as quickly as possible.
Gretchen Palmer gets about seven hundred words dedicated to her. She was my first love, and my first heartbreak. We were together for six months when I was seventeen. Gretchen loved dancing. So I loved dancing too. Ballroom dancing, to be precise. If I didn’t tell my mates about liking romantic comedies, I sure as hell didn’t tell them about doing a bit of tango with my girlfriend in the church hall every Sunday afternoon. Can you imagine the response?
But Gretchen loved it, and I was more than happy to keep her happy by being her willing partner on the dance floor, whenever she wanted me to be.
I lost my virginity to Gretchen.
I then lost Gretchen to a twenty-one-year-old Asda assistant manager called Simon Pickings, who drove a restored 1978 Ford Cortina. I have never shopped in an Asda since.
Next came Yukio Sagawa. She was a student, studying cookery at my university, and I met her in the halls of residence. She spoke flawless English and dressed like a bohemian princess. My provincial little brain could barely cope. She opened my eyes to the world and showed me what was outside my comfort zone.
Yukio was an excellent cook, as you’d imagine. And she loved to cook and eat oriental food from every country in the Far East – with increasingly exotic ingredients as she got better at it.
Therefore, I also cooked and ate oriental food. Even though I don’t like chilli. Or garlic. Or noodles. Or rice.
In fact, truth be told, I hate oriental food, but I wanted to keep Yukio happy, so I ended up eating a lot of stuff with a barely concealed grimace on my face. Do you know how hard it is to look happy about chomping down on a salty, wiggly octopus leg? Extremely hard, as it turns out. I must have got very good at it, though, because Yukio never seemed to notice that I’d go a slight shade of green every time she produced a new delicacy for me to try.
Watching me eat something that I’d probably be bringing back up again once she was out of the room always put a big, happy smile on her face, though, so the gastro-intestinal discomfort was worth it.
Yukio was unbearably exciting to be around . . . right up until the point where she wasn’t around any more. At the end of our university courses, she announced that she was moving back to Tokyo. I, of course, offered to go with her. I would have gone anywhere with her, to be honest. But she said she wanted to be alone again. To be able to explore her own identity – or some such other bullshit.
Yukio gets over fifteen hundred words in my rapidly expanding article.
Lisa DeVoe was a sweet, sensible girl, who seemed to adore me. We met online, after a period of singularity for me that had lasted two years.
Lisa was an archaeologist, and loved her some dinosaurs. So I loved me some dinosaurs as well. To this day I can tell you all about the flora and fauna of the Jurassic and Triassic periods with no hesitation whatsoever, thanks to Lisa DeVoe.
This was all a lot easier to get along with than the ballroom dancing or the awful food, as it mainly involved looking at books and drinking coffee. It did also occasionally mean that I had to stand in a wet ditch with a trowel in my hand, but that was a small price to pay to see the happy look on Lisa’s face when I dug up a Roman coin.
It was never a whirlwind romance with Lisa, but over time I became very fond of her, and I thought she felt the same way about me.
Right up until she dumped me in the middle of sex.
Yep. That’s right. One minute I’m pumping away happily, the next I’m looking down into the crying eyes of a woman who it turns out doesn’t want to be with me any more.
Her reasons? She said she wasn’t excited by our relationship – which is just the kind of thing you want to hear while you’re still inside someone. My unexciting penis withdrew extremely quickly at that point and became even less excited as I sat there while she explained how she felt.
It just didn’t ‘feel right’ to her any more, apparently.
In much the same way as that knocking noise from the rear axle doesn’t feel right, so you take it into the garage for a once-over.
No garage for me, though. I was sent straight to the scrapyard.
Lisa gets six hundred words in ‘Dumped Actually’.
Which brings us back to the most recent disaster, of course – that of Samantha Ealing.
As has been established, Samantha was ‘the one’. Funny, intelligent, beautiful, witty. I couldn’t have created a better girlfriend for myself if you’d given me a test tube and access to expensive DNA sampling equipment.
It was love at first sight with Samantha. I’d only gone into the garden centre to buy some lavender for my balcony, and I ended up falling in love. It was the bees, you see. I wanted the lavender because I’d read in an article on Actual Life by one of my fellow writers that the bee population of the UK was plummeting, and one of the ways to help them out was by planting lavender. Also, I knew it would please my parents if I took more of an interest in plants.
I bumped into Samantha on my search for the lavender, and she showed me where it was. By the time we’d finished our impromptu discussion about the plight of the country’s bee population, I was totally smitten.
So much so that I asked for her phone number there and then. It was an act of such brazen confidence that it made me quite light-headed. I nearly threw up when she actually gave it to me.
It was like something out of . . . yes, you’ve guessed it, a Richard Curtis movie. With Samantha, I really felt like I was in the best romantic comedy I’d ever seen. I also felt like she was the girl I would finally have the perfect relationship with.
So began the happiest period in my life. I walked around on cloud nine the entire time we were together. We never argued. We always had a good time together. Her interests coincided with mine quite a lot, and we were very much on the same wavelength. Everything just clicked into place right from the get-go. It was perfect.
Until it wasn’t.
I still have no idea why Samantha finished with me. I thought we were forever.
I write over three thousand words about Samantha, until I realise I’ve gone way overboard, and cut it back by five hundred words.
With all of my heartaches laid bare, I then move on to the second section of the article – about how the hell I’m supposed to get over this latest split.
So far, I’ve done what anybody does when they get dumped. I’ve cried, I’ve wailed, I’ve got drunk, I’ve fallen into a mise
rable pit of depression.
. . . exactly the same way I did after Gretchen, Yukio and Lisa gave me the old heave-ho.
But I can’t go on like this. It’s becoming too much for me to cope with. It’s also unbearably cliché when you get right down to it. And I hate to be cliché. In my writing, as well as my life.
Erica’s idea to make ‘Dumped Actually’ a more interactive experience, by asking the readers what tips they could give me on getting over my heartbreak, was inspired. People love to contribute. More than anything. Everyone has their own tale of relationship disaster, and I have no doubt that a lot of people will be keen to share them with me – along with how they managed to get over them.
Once I’ve got a few good ones in, I can publish them in a follow-up article, with my thoughts about how effective they might be. It’ll write itself! I’m sure I’ll get enough responses to maybe do two or three additional features, which will keep me going for a few weeks of material. I have no idea if it’ll help Actual Life grow its subscriber base, but I’m sure it’ll please those who already visit the site.
It’s gone 9 p.m. before I have finished the first draft of ‘Dumped Actually’. I’ve never been this late at work. It’s quite an eerie experience. The office is empty other than me. Even Erica went home over an hour ago, handing me the key to lock up. I barely said two words to her, that’s how intent I was on focussing on the article. She didn’t mind. In fact, I’m sure she was delighted to see me so committed to it.
I finish the final line of the now lengthy feature and lean back in my chair, expelling the air from my mouth in a long sigh. I feel emotionally drained. Which is a first for me when I’m writing. It’s hard to get emotionally invested in the décor at the Hayes Retro Cinema experience, unless you have a particular thing for chandeliers and red velvet carpet.
I also have a pounding headache, so it’s probably time to get up from this desk and head for home.
I email the draft over to Erica, hoping she’ll get a chance to look over it tomorrow morning. I have no idea whether she’ll think it’s any good or not, but it’s the best I can do. I’ve put all of my energy into this one, and I don’t think I have any more to expend.
By the time I get home, I am absolutely exhausted, and fall into the first deep sleep I’ve managed since Horst and his companions oompahed me back into the lonely single life.
‘Ollie! This is brilliant!’ Erica says to me the next morning, clutching a printout of ‘Dumped Actually’ as she walks over to where I’ve just sat down in front of my computer.
‘Is it?’ I say, rubbing one eye.
I slept like the dead last night and am having trouble shaking it off.
‘Absolutely!’ she says, perching herself on the end of my desk. ‘It’s the best thing you’ve ever written. Genuinely heartfelt, raw . . . and real.’
‘Oh, it’s definitely real, alright,’ I reply with a grimace. ‘More’s the pity.’
‘I’ve already been through and done an edit. Can you get the polished version back to me today? I want to get this live by this evening!’
‘Really?’ It’s normally a good week or more before Actual Life articles are ready to go. Erica must really think this one is a winner.
I think it’s a pretty good feature myself, but I’m not sure it’s quite the revelation my boss wants it to be.
‘Er, yeah. I guess so.’
‘Excellent!’ She pats me excitedly on the shoulder a couple of times. ‘Well done, Ollie. This is very good stuff. Could be just the kind of thing that’ll bring in more subscribers.’
Oh God. Now I feel something I hate when I’ve written an article – pressure.
Erica is obviously pinning quite a lot of her hopes to stave off Benedict and his desire to liquidate the website on this thing, but I think she might be exaggerating its potential a wee bit. I’m sure an article about being dumped will be quite popular, but popular enough to increase our subscriber base again? I don’t see that happening.
And when it doesn’t, will Erica blame me? Will she think I didn’t do enough of a good job with ‘Dumped Actually’?
You see? Pressure.
I hate it, and I don’t cope well with it.
As I begin to go through the feature to polish it up for publication, I am starting to deeply regret the whole thing.
I am a man already consumed by regret these days – I don’t need any more heaped on my shoulders.
But I’ve made my own stupid bed now, haven’t I?
‘Dumped Actually’ is now officially a thing.
And to be fair, it’s a thing I’m quite proud of. It is a good story, after all.
But good enough to help turn the tide at Actual Life?
I don’t think so.
For that to happen, it would have to be read and shared by tens of thousands of people. I’d have to get hundreds of responses.
I just don’t see that happening.
Not at all.
No way.
Fat bloody chance . . .
INTERLUDE
From: Monica Blake ([email protected])
Hi Ollie!
Just finished reading ‘Dumped Actually’ and had to get in touch. Poor you! I feel so sorry for what you’ve been through! Can’t believe that Samantha would do that to you. You seem like such a nice guy ☺.
You said you wanted to hear from people who have been dumped before, and I am one of them! My husband, Steve, left me a year and half ago, just after our baby boy, Alex, was born. He told me he wanted out during a nappy change, while his face was covered in a load of Alex’s fresh diarrhoea. I guess that was the final straw. The joys of fatherhood just weren’t for him, it seemed. I thought I’d married a man, but he turned out to be a scared little boy. He rejected me and our baby. Can you imagine how horrible that was?
It was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through, so I know exactly how you’re feeling .
What I did to get through the break-up was I went and got a full makeover! It sounds silly, but it really helped me get some of my self-esteem back, and feel better about myself again. Steve always used to put me down. Told me I was fat a lot, especially after Alex was born . But I went out and re-did my whole look, and it made me feel ten times better!
I know you’re a bloke, and it probably doesn’t sound like a good idea to you, but you should give it a go! The guy I went to was fabulous. I can give you his details, if you like!
Best wishes, Ollie. I really hope that you feel better soon, whatever you decide to do about it!
Lots of Love,
Monica
From: Edward ‘Wolf’ Moresby ([email protected])
Dear Mr Sweet,
I am writing to you after having completed your entertaining story on the Actual Life dot com website. I was prompted to read it by my sister, who enjoys those types of websites. She felt that I might have some salient advice for you, since I myself have known the pain of a lost relationship, and subsequently discovered an effective way of moving past it.
When my Heather felt that her marriage to me was no longer workable and left me to move to the south of France, I was understandably upset. For some time I did not know how to cope with her loss. I eventually turned to the solace of the Cairngorms in the Highlands of Scotland for some sort of release from the upset. I spent two weeks up there with Davis and Roundhouse – my two best friends from my rugby club, and it was quite wonderful. It’s good for the soul to spend time with like-minded people, doing like-minded pursuits, in like-minded clothing. Spending time in the embrace of Mother Nature is also extremely good for the soul. It offers the chance for contemplation and reflection. It really took my mind off Heather, especially with the support of my friends.
When I returned, I felt more able to carry on without her, and have never looked back since. I highly suggest you attempt something similar for your recovery.
Do let me know if you decide to follow my advice, and how you get on.
Yours,
Wolf
Moresby
From: Callie Donnelly ([email protected])
Ollie,
Am in a bit of a rush, so don’t have much time to write this, but just wanted to email you to say that I loved reading ‘Dumped Actually’ this morning on my way into work on the train. Really hit home how bad break-ups can be.
My advice? I’ve always found that the best way of getting over somebody is to get under somebody else! Sounds crude, but it’s absolutely true.
Don’t just sit on a shelf and do nothing. Get back out there and find another woman as quick as you can. It’s what I’ve always done, and it’s always made me feel a lot better. Your self-esteem takes a big hit when somebody gets rid of you, and there’s no better way of building it back up again than finding someone else to climb into bed with!
Best of luck with it. I’ll keep reading your stuff, and I’ll get my friends to subscribe as well. You’re really good!
Callie xxx
CHAPTER FOUR
THE IMPOSSIBLE ART OF SAYING NO
A fully grown man is about to tear a strip of sticky waxed paper away from my arsehole, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.
Oh, no. Hang on. I know exactly how I feel about it: nauseous and terrified.
‘Now, Oliver, this might hurt a bit!’ Laughlin McPurty tells me cheerfully. ‘You may feel a wee sting.’
‘Eeeeuuurrrgggggghhhhh,’ is about all I can manage in response.
Why?
Because I’ve already been through several ‘treatments’ that I’m pretty sure are banned by the Geneva Convention. My cognitive abilities have been severely impaired by all of them. I almost don’t want this waxing to be over that quickly, as I’m fairly sure the next thing on Laughlin McPurty’s list is waterboarding.
But let us return to last Tuesday, to discover why I find myself in the position of a man about to become far less hirsute.
It turns out I wasn’t entirely correct about how much of a response I’d get to ‘Dumped Actually’. I may have underestimated things just a tad.
Dumped, Actually Page 7
