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I have a plan for my old age. Now that we all might live for a century or so, feeling redundant and bemused, it’s important to prepare and I have. In my eighties I will be a destroyer of drones. All drones will fall within my remit but my speciality will be hobby drones, the remote-control quadcopters that whine over the English countryside, up and down the coast and round and round above our national parks.
To any passerby I will seem innocuous; just your average rambling octogenarian. But tucked away beside my Freedom Pass will be a catapult and the case containing my varifocals will be heavy with 6mm steel ball bearings.
The plan came to me a few days ago as I was floating in the North Sea. It was a slack tide, the only time that’s really good for swimming, and the seals were crooning. The stress of London life had just begun to lift when I heard that telltale nasal whine, and turned and saw the little horror skimming the waves, a blot against the bright sky, its camera lens twitching in and out like a proboscis.
There are many annoying noises in the countryside, but nothing, for me, beats a drone. Lawnmowers, chainsaws, leaf blowers — perhaps if you hate your neighbor they’re hard to bear, but at least they serve a purpose. When the job ends, so does the noise. A drone idles in the sky indefinitely and there’s no telling what it’s up to. It destroys not just the silence but the feel of solitude. And what’s the point? Who looks back at all those thousands of hours of swooping footage? All those bird’s-eye views of the coast, wasting space in server farms.
Conor Friedersdorf once wrote a piece for the Atlantic about the very particular horrors of drone warfare in Pakistan. “Women cower in their homes. Children are kept out of schools. The stress they endure gives them psychiatric disorders. Men are driven crazy by an inability to sleep as drones buzz overhead twenty-four hours a day.” It’s absurd to compare toy drones to their killer cousins, and yet… they have something in common. Just the sight of them is stressful, oppressive.
It’s often hard to spot a drone’s operators, but the other day by the sea they were easy to identify. A man and a woman standing on the beach nearby, heads together examining the drone’s footage on a phone — watching me, perhaps, my eyes bugged out with rage, lips a hypothermic blue.
I could, I suppose, have risen dripping from the sea and accosted them. I could have told them that there were oystercatchers trying to nest on the rocks nearby, and explained how stressful drones are for wildlife. I could have asked them to watch the famous video of a mother bear and her cubs in Canada, scared literally to death by a drone. But what would have been the point?
Drone hobbyists are often jolly types, fathers and sons on an afternoon out. It never occurs to them how much damage they do, and anyhow, they’re innocent, quite within their rights. Though the administrators that govern the British countryside usually love a ban, for some reason they give drones a pass. Dogs must be kept on leashes, but drones roam free. Snowdonia, Dartmoor, the Lake District, Northumberland National Park — all legal droning zones. I can’t for the life of me think why. We’re told endlessly to get out and enjoy nature for our mental and physical health. So why do the authorities permit an activity that so quickly and casually ruins the countryside for everyone?
In the suburbs, I’m told, perverts fly quadcopters low over swimming pools and hot tubs, filming without fear of being caught. When I’m old I shall have business cards made up advertising my drone-destroying services and pop them through suburban letterboxes. I’ll hide like a sniper in the pampas grass, catapult at the ready, and knock peeping drones out of the sky. And when I’m bold enough and a confident crackshot, I’ll bring my catapult to London.
This week the Metropolitan Police’s chief scientific advisor, Paul Taylor, claimed that drones will soon be used to pursue criminals in cars. There’s been a fuss made about the danger police car chases pose to suspects and Taylor thinks drones could be the answer. With respect to Taylor, this is nuts. Most police chases begin when a suspect refuses to obey an officer’s request to stop. So how can a drone help? What’s an officer to do: call the drone squad miles away at drone HQ? Hope the prospective criminal waits politely while he digs his quadcopter out of the trunk? I’m not even sure it’s safer to be chased by a drone than by a car. Imagine trying to keep the nasty hornet in your rear-view mirror while driving at high speed.
I expect that before I’m eighty, surveillance drones will be part of city life. But my bet is that they’ll be deployed to catch not criminals but civilians. Every criminal worth his salt in London already wears a face mask full-time, so what use can facial recognition cameras be? Instead drones will be set on motorists who go at more than 20mph or try to sneak around a Low Traffic Neighborhood roadblock. Council drones will scout for parking misdemeanors and hover in the hope of catching someone putting the wrong thing in the wrong bin.
No matter — I’ll be prepared by then. I’m serious about my vocation and have already found a catapult I like on a website for End Time preppers. The tech may improve over the next three decades, but for the purposes of immediate practice this one seems good. It divides easily into two separate parts, a stem and another bit that doubles up as an actual knuckle-duster. I’ll wear a face mask myself and spend my dotage lying in wait, catapult at the ready. I’m looking forward to it.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
