Should we ban drones from our national parks?

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 neighbour 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.