Mairi Holden is a single mum to four-year-old Oscar and raised over £13,000 after getting a parking ticket

It all started earlier this year in February when I had to rush my son Oscar to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh. He has problems with his breathing sometimes, a bit like an asthma attack, and it had flared up after we had been to a soft play.

I just parked on a single yellow line outside the A&E but we ended up getting kept in overnight which I hadn’t been expecting and I found I had two parking tickets on my car the next day. Underneath one of them though was £25 and a note saying "pay it and forget it happened". I was overwhelmed that a stranger would do that so I put a post on Facebook to let my friends know. It went viral and journalists started getting in touch with me.

I knew I could appeal the parking ticket so I decided to give the £25 to the Sick Kids Friends Foundation. With so many people interested I wondered if I could raise even more so I doubled the money and started a JustGiving page and posted the link on social media and the journalists who had got in touch with me put it in their stories. It raised £10,000 in the first few days and it’s continued to go up to over £13,000 now. It’s been crazy and so nice, we have had donations from America, Australia, Cyprus, Bahrain, all over the world.

I’ve never raised money for charity before. I was really overwhelmed with the response and I'm delighted for Sick Kids, as they have always been brilliant with Oscar, it’s a lovely charity to give back to.

It just shows you don’t know how far an act of kindness can go.

Nobody has ever come forward. It think it could be an older person because of the style of the handwriting, so it might be they don’t want any media attention or they just want to keep it anonymous. I’m not hunting them down or anything, I think initially the papers wanted to find them but if they have not come forward I don’t want to chase them. I just hope they will see what has happened with what they have done.

If I could say anything to them it would be: "Thank you so much. The way it made me feel at a not very nice time, and what it has done, has touched a lot of people globally it is just amazing."

I’m going to try and keep things going. The media coverage has really helped so I have a few plans for the future but nothing set in stone yet.

I think spreading a bit more love in the world inspires people to do similar things. It would make me want to do that for someone else because of the way it made me feel. The more people that do things like that the more positive a world we are going to have. It beats all the negative stories in the paper.

Donate toMairi's Just Giving page.