My youngest is obsessed with skating right now, and that means I spend a lot of time taking them to skate parks, pump tracks and so on. For a bit of variety yesterday we went to one of the more far-away favourites, a track near the national football stadium in Glasgow’s south side, and that’s where I had to have a conversation with my ten-year-old when they showed me a particularly prominent and vicious sectarian sticker and asked what it meant.

There’s no need to detail what the sticker said; it was a threat of violence towards Catholics. But it’s a conversation I’d really rather not have with my kid on a sunny Sunday morning.

There’s something particularly repellent about bigots’ stickers, I think. They’re uniformly ugly, and they leave a mess behind – assuming you’re willing to risk taking them down, because since the days of the National Front there’s been the fear that there may be a razor blade underneath as a trap for would-be removers. They’re repellent because their vandalism is much more in-your-face than something sprayed on a wall.

But I think what’s most repellent about them is the cowardice they demonstrate. At least spray painters risk being caught.

What’s really sad about this sticker in particular is that when I saw it, my first reaction wasn’t horror but surprise: I’m used to removing a dozen or more bigoted stickers each and every week when I walk my dog near my home, but this wasn’t one I’ve seen before. That’s because the stickers I’m used to taking down aren’t anti-Catholic; they’re anti-trans. But the hatred and the cowardice are just the same.