TAVERN OF THE SEAS david biggs The Year of the Drone

LOOKING at the Christmas supplements in our newspapers, it seems to me 2017 will go down in history as the “Year of the Drone”.

Almost every large retail company is offering drones of varying degrees of sophistication and, as they say, “prices to suit every pocket”.

You can buy a tiny pocketsized drone to fly in your bedroom and terrorise the family dog, or a high-tech professional model with a wide range and a built-in camera. I suspect that January will be alive with the sound of buzzing drones.

I had my first face-to-face encounter with a drone not so long ago when one of the guests at a dinner party hauled out his little machine and set it hovering above the dining table. I think he was taking photographs of the guests and storing them on his smartphone.

Great fun and not too offensive, as we were all friends. But there might have been a different reaction if he had piloted his little spy camera over the fence to take a peek at the neighbour’s dinner table.

I suspect we will be seeing

What will Mrs Nextdoor be able to do when she notices an inquisitive drone hovering outside her bathroom window? Is it a municipal water policeman checking on her water consumption or the neighbour having a look?

I see they have developed anti-drone drones now to swoop down and destroy illegal drones in sensitive areas like airfields. Maybe that will be the next big Christmas craze – anti-drones.

Mrs Nextdoor will blast you to small pieces if you peek. This could add a new realism to computer games.

Last Laugh

The bar was crowded one Saturday night and it was quite some time before Jimmy managed to attract the barman’s eye and order a beer.

By the time the beer arrived he needed to go to the toilet, but was worried that someone might drink the beer while he was away, so he wrote a little note saying, “I spat in the beer” and propped it against the glass.

When he returned there were three other notes against the beer glass. All three said, “so did I”.