Morag’s old boys are web sensations.

What’s with all the litter all of a sudden? I thought when all this coronavirus carry-on was over we were going to mend our ways, remember the community spirit that has carried us through, consider how nature has flourished without us humans messing it up and stop behaving like selfish so and sos as we embrace the new normal.

But here we are. The lockdown shackles are easing, Primark’s open, you can almost taste that first pint and parks and streets across the country are bedecked not in bunting but with discarded bottles and burger wrappers.

It’s not like litter hasn’t always been a low-level pox on all our public places, but for some reason being freed from the restrictions of the past few months seems to have given some people a licence to act like absolute horrors.

I’ve read various psychological explanations. People who have been asked to stick to rules in a way we have never known before are sticking it to the man and rebelling by dropping their rubbish wherever they feel like it.

We’ve all forgotten what normal behaviour entails and are having to relearn the social rules.

Three months confined to barracks has left us feeling disconnected from the outdoor world and all the ways we impact upon it.

Or they could all just be tossers. I think York might have been the first place to erect signs giving litterers that label and challenging people to tick the box that explains why they do it – because I’m lazy, I don’t care about this community, or I expect other people to clean up after me.

Now campaigners are calling on Perth and Kinross Council to follow suit, reasoning anything’s worth a try if it eats into the £2 million annual cost of clearing up after litterbugs.

Give it a go, I say. Will it change behaviour? I’d love to see it. I’m sure there’s method in the message but I’ll be astonished if it works where other approaches have failed.

I lived at Lunan Bay for a year when I started work at The Courier. On windswept wintry Tuesdays it was heaven on Earth. On sunny Saturdays, it was busier than Reform Street and on Monday mornings it was a soul-crushing sea of burned-out disposable barbecues, wet wipes and plastic wrappers.

At first I got angry. Then I got a black bag and started picking up the worst of it like some demented Womble. It wasn’t my mess, it wasn’t my job, but if I left it the dogs might trample on glass, the cygnets might choke on sweetie papers, the plastic might be swept out to sea and all that rubbish would still be lying around making me furious. Was it fair? No. Did I curse with every scrap I shoved in my bag? Hell, yes.

But did it leave the place looking a little more like paradise at least until the next weekend? Also yes. So that was something. As councils face an onslaught of demands on their finances in the weeks and months ahead, I fear litter clearing may have to slide further down the scale of priorities. Maybe we are all going to have to pitch in and prove how much we respect our communities, even if the tossers don’t.

If I had to choose one word to describe my dad I would pick kind. He says when his own father did someone a good turn and they offered to return the favour, he always told them he didn’t need it and to pass it on to someone else, and that’s the way he’s lived his life too.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, the day after I mentioned my ancient arthritic lurcher was struggling to negotiate the gravel path to the

garden, he turned up at my back door with a car boot full of slabs that he just happened to have lying around and quietly laid a trail of stepping stones to create a more forgiving surface for gnarly old paws.

I was indoors, oblivious, and only discovered it when I switched off my computer and took the dogs out for their evening constitutional. The old lad took to his new path with gusto so I filmed a video of his wobbly maiden voyage on my phone, posted it to Twitter, imagining my doggy friends and workmates might appreciate it, and thought no more about it.

Then my phone started buzzing. By bedtime it had been liked 8,000 times and shared hundreds more. At the time of writing this, it’s had 39,000 likes and 2,000 retweets. Strangers in every corner of the globe have been getting in touch to say nice things and with the aid of Google translate I’ve been passing on messages of cheer written in Hindi and Portuguese to my bemused 77-year-old father who has yet to figure out what Whatsapp’s for, never mind get to grips with his newfound social media clout.

I’m not sharing this to show off. Honestly, I’m as baffled by the reaction as the next person and I’ll be back to the digital equivalent of screaming into the void tomorrow. I mention it because it made me smile and made me see that for all the bad news and negativity in the world, sometimes a simple act of kindness can go a very long way.

Clockwise from top left: lurcher Tavish makes the most of newlypaved path; rubbish spills out from a bin on the Meadows, Edinburgh; empty beer garden at the Ship Inn, Elie, ready for reopening; queues outside Primark in Dunfermline as the store reopens; litter-picker Wombles; and, inset, Morag’s dad, Bill Lindsay, new social media star.