It was a trend long before lockdown, but I am sure the pandemic has fuelled an unhealthy obsession with our pets.

My social media timelines are rammed with people posting inanities about their so-called fur babies. And it’s around this time of year that the emphasis shifts yet further on to animals and away from humans, and that cannot be healthy.

Radio stations were playing soothing music, dog owners were putting up sound-proofing, people were going away for the weekend, because their surrogate children were scared of the noise made by fireworks.

I had a dog. But in my house our dog was just that. She didn’t get to jump on our beds, far less sleep on one. She didn’t roam around the dining table when people were eating and pester them for scraps. And she didn’t bully us into doing anything.

But she was a black Labrador, and therefore intelligent and sentient enough to know the score.

And during this cooing and clucking about dogs last week, many turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to people who were scared - the elderly, those with mental health issues, and military veterans, for whom fireworks are a curse which teleports them straight back to hell.

I hate them. They take me to a very dark place, and I know some who disappear into the hills and camp until the whole trauma of Bonfire Night has fizzled out. But still, as long as the doggoes are OK, then that’s all that matters.

Helensburgh got it right this year with a popular public display, the first since 2019, from a barge in the Clyde beside the Civic Centre.

And while organised events like this one are all good and well, if you don’t mind your council tax going up in smoke when there’s a cost-of-living crisis, it is long past the time for the public sale of fireworks to be banned.

It is totally beyond my comprehension how powerful pyrotechnics can be purchased on the High Street by anybody, with absolutely no sanction on the user.

The majority of these fireworks are used as toys or weapons, with safety never once considered, not for family bonfire night parties.

The sickening scenes from Dundee and Edinburgh surely amplify the point. It’s bad enough when neds are equipped with sticks and stones: why legally arm them with weapons which could maim or kill, and which are used to attack police officers and firefighters?

Get them banned now so people can live in peace. Oh, and dogs too.