Ladies and gentlemen, put down your scones and pick up your smelling salts, for we have a tale that curdles the cream and thickens the jam. Yes, true crime fans have gathered at CrimeCon, that annual bacchanal of blood spatter and victimology, where the bereaved rub shoulders with the baying. And now, UK criminologists have waded in with a pearl-clutching proclamation: this voyeurism, they warn, is a bit risky.
Broken biscuits. As if we needed academics to tell us that gawping at grief is gauche. I have seen more self-awareness in a hungover herring.
These aren't fans, they're ghouls with good stationery. They pore over case files like lepidopterists pinning butterflies, except the butterflies were once people with names and families who didn't ask to be specimen jars for the macabre. The criminologists tut about desensitisation and the commodification of tragedy, but let's be honest.
They're just jealous they weren't invited to the party. I've peered into this abyss myself, once at a true crime convention in Slough, where a man tried to sell me a 'serial killer colouring book' while his wife wept softly into a tupperware of vol-au-vents. The risibility of it all.
We have become a nation of armchair detectives, obsessed with the darkest corners of the human soul, yet we flinch when a spider scuttles across the lino. The hypocrisy would be hilarious if it weren't so damned tragic. So shall we toast, with a gin that tastes faintly of remorse, to the new normal?
To the fact that we now need experts to remind us that other people's pain is not a spectator sport. Bravo. I'm off to find a quiet corner to weep into my notebook.
And that's a promise, not a threat.
