A wise man once said that his favourite thing was getting dumped.

When you've been dumped then you've got unlimited license to Be Dramatic. "How are you?" "AWFUL. I just got DUMPED." - and whoever you're talking to will have their face crumple in sympathy. You can Wallow. You can Grieve. You can stand up on stage and let your feelings out in a furious karaoke ballad and every one in the crowd will Get It. There are so many complicated, powerful feelings to work through in Getting Dumped - the twin enlightenments of 'I will become better' and 'fuck you'. It's liberation, and like all liberations it is both harsh and joyful.

So why save that feeling for a relationship ending? Human beings are inherently animistic, and that means that we form bonds with objects as readily as we do with people - and those bonds are no more guaranteed to be positive than our bonds with people. Perhaps rather than adapting to the clunk and ache of your car's gear shifting to third it has become a gradual annoyance that has made curse words part of your driving experience. Maybe you haven't read a book in six months because you're halfway through a turgid and uninspired volume that you feel like you need to finish first. Perhaps there's a little goat path through the lawn where people regularly cut across at a direct angle rather than following the trail of concrete. Patches develop over broken things naturally, but every year at the Dumping Festival it's time to rip those patches off and fix the underlying problems.

Part of it is the market; the huge open-air garage sale, the trash-and-treasure where people have bought out all of their material possessions that no longer spark joy. Sometimes it's racecars, or houses, or pet elephants that turned out to be more trouble than necessarily predicted. Sometimes it's more conceptual; photographs, mementos, trophies, the physical things that make memories. Another part of it is, of course, Breakup Bridge. It's a comfort to a lot of people coming off the back of a failed relationship to find themselves in a crowd of people in similar situations. Even if a relationship has been over for months, most former couples still find the time to make it official by leaving in different directions over the Bridge.

But for every moment of someone getting rid of something or someone, there's a moment of something or someone being picked up. There's no better dating mixer than the crowd outside Breakup Bridge - everyone is guaranteed single, and everyone has something in common. There's no better place to fall in love with a new object than seeing it on the mat in front of someone who cannot love it any more. Desire is often a transitory thing; for every love that can deepen into the ocean's eternity, there's one that will glance off still water like a skipping stone. So, every year everyone airs out all of their dusty rooms, picks up the broken vacuum cleaners they were holding onto, or forgotten pool pump, or old allan keys for furniture assembled in the distant past. They let light into the dark corners by placing everything that had grown dusty into the open. An exorcism of possession, beneath the light of a single sun.