I am the key to the lock in your house

That's it.

I'm done.

No more Daily Mails. No more lottery. No more scratchcards. No more wincing as someone buys Psychic News and rips into it as if - well, as if their life depended on it. No more staring in bemused fascination at Chat magazine, who have felt it necessary, with characteristic helpfulness, to furnish the headline "Rapist gave me HIV" with the explanatory legend "Tragic!". Just in case you thought it was a humour piece.

No more smiling at sweet little children only to then accidentally jump-cut the smile to their conspicuously unsweet mothers; paper-skinned, perma-snarled, terrifyingly young creatures from very bad dreams, with faces that one can obtain oneself by adhering to the following steps.

1. Buy Cosmopolitan.
2. Cut out a model's face from an advert in Cosmopolitan.
3. Colour in the model's face with old watercolours and dying pencils.
4. Smash the model's face into your own repeatedly in a desperate attempt at emulation.

If exclamation marks were something I indulged in, I would fill up the whole of the internets with them at this point.

And so it ends.

Observation the last: The Human Creature Is A Shameless Voyeur

We all - or the vast majority of us, anyway - have that rather worrying tendency to crane our necks at car crashes as we dribble past them on the motorway, hoping/not hoping to catch sight of a body. It's not an attractive instinct, but it is understandable; a kind of fascination with human frailty combined with sheer horror, I would say. And that's fine.

What isn't fine is when one takes this suspect instinct and gorges it on the misery and pain of others. I am speaking, of course, of the publishing phenomenon that is the Tragic Life Story. At first these type of books did well because they were well-written, interesting and emphasised the triumph of the human being over horrible and disturbing adversity.

I think a list of some of the titles of the modern crop of Tragic Life Stories illustrates what has happened now.

• Please Let It Stop
• The Family Friend
• Dance For Your Daddy
• Daddy's Little Girl
  
• Tears at Bedtime
• Daddy's Little Earner
• Tell Me Why, Mummy
• When Daddy Comes Home
• Please, Daddy, No

On the day I left, I noticed - honestly - a new hardback with the title Pin Down.

Now, I assume the poor victims who write these books achieve some kind of catharsis out of them, as well as the promise of some pennies. Calling your book Please, Daddy, No seems a strange way, to me, to deal with the abuse one has suffered. But, really, what do I know? I've never been through the terrible things the author has been through and it would be unfair and stupid to criticize him or her for dealing with their issues in this way.

What concerns me is the many, many, many people who buy these books. Glancing at a car crash is all very well, but these people are stopping the car, running over to the crumpled vehicle and jamming their faces into the mangled guts of the unfortunate driver. Seriously, what kind of person buys a book called When Daddy Comes Home? What are they thinking?

"Ooh! This one's definitely got a lot of incest and abuse in it. I might read it twice!"

It's horrible and it's wrong and it's strange and it's sick and we'd all be going to hell if there was one which there isn't.

But I'm going to Ecuador. And, surely, they only write magic realism over there.

Goodbye UK internets.