If there is one thing in this fine county of ours which is most likely to get us all riled up it is littering.

And quite rightly so. The behaviour of lazy people dumping their detritus on our roadsides, town centres or beaches is, frankly, inexcusable.

It’s easy to blame ‘out of towners’ for such behaviour, but, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never gone on a day out and thought to myself I’ll let all my standards drop and chuck my fish and chip wrapper in someone’s front garden. I doubt many others do.

No, those who make a mess, more often than not, are those who live and work in the very county they trash.

But sometimes it’s not deliberate.

Take last weekend for example. You will, no doubt, remember how the ludicrously named Storm Bert brought high winds.

But it also caused chaos for those of us for whom Monday is the day our recycling is collected.

I don’t know what it is like where you are, but in Thanet, our binmen are up with the lark.

My 6.30am alarm clock is still showing five-something when I am awoken by the sound of the bin lorry beeping its way down the road and the bang, crash, wallop of bottles and cans being collected.

For the avoidance of any doubt, I don’t have an issue with this – unless, of course, I’ve forgotten to put the bins out. Such a mistake will inevitably mean we spend the next fortnight drowning amid a seemingly ever-growing mountain of primarily Amazon-based cardboard packaging.

But the early morning timing does present a challenge.

Because it means unless you want to be padding out in your slippers and dressing gown at 4am, your recycling needs to be by the pavement the night before.

A dilemma given the high winds of Bert last weekend.

In my part of Kent. we don’t have proper plastic bins for our recycling – instead we’re tasked with stuffing it all in a red bag. The result being one big gust can quite comfortably lift it up in the air and deposit its contents around your neighbourhood.

You can, of course, buy a proper one. But they cost £60 and take an unfathomably long 10 weeks to be delivered. Frankly, I have better things to spend my money on.

But last Sunday was one of those nights I wish I had.

Because as a braved the wind and rain at 10pm to deposit everything in the designated spot, the main road on which I live was awash with rubbish. Cat food boxes cartwheeled down the road in front of me, closely followed by the junk mail of my neighbours being redelivered into the front gardens of all and sundry.

Peering down the road, and someone’s entire red bag was generously redistributing its contents as a gust threw it down the carriageway.

For a brief second, I considered running around picking it all up. But risking my life on such a busy road in such unpleasant conditions seemed, to put it mildly, rather foolhardy.

Instead, I spent some time amid the rain and wind trying to jam my flimsy recycling bag between the bin containing the bottles and cans and a wall – creating, what I hoped, was a fortress of stability.

Dear reader, it was a rare success.

But while my dog food boxes remained in place, many’s didn’t.

I can only assume similar scenes played out around the district. Around the county in fact.

Who is to blame? Well, we could point the guilty finger at Bert, climate change or Mother Nature. Or, of course, we could take better care when putting out bins out when the wind is up.