If you have the dubious honour of knowing me, you’ll be aware that the only thing I hate more than noise is sudden and unnecessary noise – like fireworks.

It’s not just that they remind me, and many others I am sure, of a bad night under bombardment in Iraq and the indescribable terror of going on foot patrol in Afghanistan, but because I don’t really see the point of them.

Yes, I suppose on the face of it they are pretty, but so are the glorious views we enjoy here in the ‘Burgh without them.

Sickeningly, as ever, was the wall to wall sympathy levelled at pets, terrified of the noise.

Nary a mention of the petrified old person or distressed child, far less the veteran living with PTSD, for whom every crack and bang takes them back to some indescribable terror.

Still, as long as Bonzo and Tiddles are OK, that’s all that matters in this grotesque new world of mollycoddled pets spoiled rotten while humans suffer.

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The classical music radio station I listen to even had an evening of soothing tunes for petrified animals on the night in question.

If you were a human and struggling, and diving for cover with every bang, no easy listening music for you – just the knowledge that your mates are going through exactly the same somewhere.

I know veterans who head to the hills and go wild camping over the dreaded 48 hours of bonfire night, so they can escape the memories. Me? I sit quietly and share dits with my old mucker John Barleycorn from Speyside.

It was so bad last weekend that while driving through Dumbarton, I hurriedly closed the car window the inch or so I had opened it to allow some fresh air inside, because I was scared that some urchin would level a squib, bazooka style, at me as I passed.

The thought of a pyrotechnic going through the crack, entering such a confined space and going off therein, killing me, or worse blinding me, petrified me.

No such confined space for Scotland’s thrill-seekers over the recent Bonfire Night weekend, as they waged war with anybody and everybody, using fireworks as legally-bought, potentially fatally-dangerous weapons.

Caught in the middle, Scotland’s amazing police officers and firefighters, who had, I am certain, better things to do.

Our emergency services do a remarkable job and have enough on their plates without having to deal with neds flinging fireworks.

Limit them to official displays, although why council tax payers’ money would be wasted on such profligacy during a cost of living crisis is beyond me. And more importantly ban their public sale.