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Now, apparently, looking forward to the next episode of Just a Minute makes me morally indistinguishable from a child abuser.

Mr Todd gets it much worse. He’s more active than I am on Facebook, having not yet accepted it’s a cursed place best visited only for lost cat appeals.

He’s called a paedo at least twice a day. For opposing Brexit, criticising Boris Johnson or Tommy Robinson, and disliking tatty flags hanging upside-down from lampposts.

Sometimes the accusation arrives without explanation, like a sort of conversational jump-scare: Paedo. End of argument.

Oh you can’t trust a leftie with your kids, they sing to us at anti-racist rallies, to the tune of She’ll be coming round the Mountain, and it’s so damn catchy I find myself humming it for days afterwards.

We both hate children, incidentally. Smelly germy irritants.

This is not a niche experience. “Paedo” has become one of the most casually deployed terms of abuse in British public life.

It now functions as a kind of rhetorical weapon of mass destruction: conversation-ending, morally annihilating and entirely detached from evidence.

It no longer means “someone sexually attracted to children”. It means “I despise you and would like you to shut up forever”.

The shifting meaning matters, not only because its new use is so lazy and omnipresent as to render it irrelevant.

The word paedophile describes a specific paraphilia: a persistent attraction to pre-pubescent children.

Clinically defined and comparatively rare - around 1% of the population, rather than, say, everyone who votes Labour - and not always synonymous with child sexual abuse (many abusers are not paedophiles, and many paedophiles never offend).

But you wouldn’t know any of that from how the word is used now. In everyday British discourse, it has been hollowed out and repurposed as a generalised insult, a moral kill switch.

This is a peculiarly British phenomenon. Other countries have political invective, certainly: in the US they sell car stickers which feature Trump peeing on his opponents’ faces.

But Britain has developed a particular obsession with paedophilia as the ultimate symbol of evil; the one crime beyond argument, beyond rehabilitation, beyond nuance.