A few days later, he dumped me by text.

'I went out with my ex last night and we've decided to give it another go.'

I felt kicked, breathless, lost. I went and played some tinny heavy metal very loudly and cried my eyes out. I think I even did that thing where I slid down a doorframe, like they do in all the good movies. But in the end, I got on with it, washing, dressing, barely eating and wearing all black.

'Didn't see you there!' quipped a friend, bumping into me, all Sicilian Widow in black Gap and bad eye-makeup. Sainsbury's spoilt the setting, admittedly....the Trevi Fountain would've been more appropriate.

But then! Then, my friends, he texted me....

'Hi. How are you? X'

My heart leapt, raced and all the kind of other athletically impossibly stuff that is used widely by bad novelists. And me.

But I played it cool....I was mean and calculating and left it all of 11 minutes before I replied. I slept with my phone like we were brother and sister and living together in a trailer park. Clutched, it was, to my bosom, or failing that, my pocket. I lived for its bracing vibration. And then, 2 days later, it did just that as I pulled into Tesco.

'Hullo darling!' he said, 'this is just a welfare call!'

But I fell for it all and I went round the next day. He was shooting (darling!), and strode towards me once more with all that jerkish arrogance that I'd come to love and desire more than common sense would permit.

We snuggled together on the sofa.

'I don't want to lose you from my life now I've got you,' he said, pausing to stroke my hair.

Silence passed. A horse brayed somewhere.

'Would you like to go upstairs for a cuddle?'

Again, I leapt, a little too quickly for my retrospective liking. In fact, retrospectively speaking, I'd have liked nothing more to have splattered his cream jodhpurs in my tea (milk, one sugar), finished with a slap round his ruddy (bloody) face and a knee in the groin. But I was holding his hand as he led me gently up to the creaking eaves of his house where he made very bad love to me, and passed me a bottle of body lotion once we were done.

'Could you massage my back, darling?' he said, face muffled by the pillow, head on his beefy arms.

It saddens me to think that I cheerfully, hopefully, performed my best ever effleurage strokes for this bloke, but the lesson's learned.

2 days later, he dumped me again, this time it seems, for good.

'I've realised since seeing you that I'm not over my ex,' he put, 'but I'll always remember you fondly. Keep in touch.'

A week later, he changed his number.