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Category: Drone

342 • Hard to believe

342 • Hard to believe

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Please note, we have film of your bride
In flagrante with Jekyll and Hyde;
All three wear top hats
And extravagant spats
But pretty well nothing beside.

Though the camera-work is cockeyed
Maud’s ardour cannot be denied,
And it’s hard to believe
What the two gents achieve
In the detail our drone has espied.

Your Worship may feel mortified
That he can’t always spot who’s astride
Nor indeed understand
Who has got the whip hand:
But the action is all bona fide.

So unless you are quick to provide
Thirty guineas to [details supplied]
Maud’s countless coitions
In startling positions
Will justly be famous worldwide.

Any husband would surely be disappointed to receive a note of this type, since it reveals the blackmailer not as some harmless voyeur (or voyeuse), but as a hardboiled extortionist who paints a needlessly lurid picture of the young wife’s uninhibited appetite and proclivities. Yet in this particular case the cuckold, addressed as ‘Your Worship’, is clearly a member of The Establishment and, as such, axiomatically more corrupt by far than his unjustly denigrated spouse. It seems probable, therefore, that her two partners-in-film are in fact the blackmailers, and they plan to split the spoils with their vivacious copulee. Let us hope those shares are at least equal.

341 • Droning

341 • Droning

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The first time I heard of a drone
I coveted one of my own
To take candid snaps
Of philandering chaps
And make their sins generally known.

This is not the sort of Sunday droning one typically hears from the pulpit, and the frank admission of covetousness comes as a surprise. Yet drones – because they move in a mysterious way – are naturally a source of fascination to 21st-century clergymen, just as steam-railways were to their great-grandfathers. We should not be scandalised by the proposed, puritanical plan – it’s a good deal less invidious than molesting choirboys.

340 • Cruise control

340 • Cruise control

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Please note that your humming-bird, Rex,
Is banned from the passenger decks.
We’re aware he’s a drone
Surreptitiously flown
To observe while our Captain has sex.

All kinds of questions arise when we imagine the shipboard arrangements that necessitated the above communique. (And, rather than offering reassurance, the fact that feckless recreational drones are being banned by winter cruise operators merely reminds us how seriously landlubbers’ privacy is compromised by the unpoliced residue – which throng our city skylines at the prying beck and call of amorally ruthless surveillance professionals.)

117 • Rhine recovery

117 • Rhine recovery

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I was casting my pearls before swine
When the fattest one fell in the Rhine.
Two nuns in Cologne
Fished it out with a drone,
But more by good luck than design.

Like many a parable, this poem probably answers more questions than it asks. In terms of title I toyed with ‘The Pearl Fishers’ and ‘The Pig Fishers’ but decided that either would be thoroughly misleading. In any event, the point is proven: one man’s miracle is another man’s coincidence.