FFFFFWWWWWAAAAAAOOOOOO IIIINNNNNNGG! PRRREEEE EUUUUUUUU OOOOOIIII!

Crump.

Yes, Formula 1 is back. Yippee! For the next few months, weekends will be all about watching small excitable cars shove each other off tracks in distant, dusty locations.

Our ears will hum as if we'd stuck our heads into a wasps' nest.

Of course, for Sevenoaks, the arrival of F1 has a downside.

It usually marks the annual return of another noise-producing sport. The Weekend Pilot is with us again.

We Sennockians haven't really drawn the long straw when it comes to aviation, have we? We're not close enough to a big airport to be invited to noise abatement meetings and offered the good sherry by ministers for transport.

This always strikes me as a little unfair, given that we're under the flight paths of five major airports.

Sevenoaks is probably the standard marker to alert pilots to start digging in pockets for their car park tickets.

("Tell the tower we're having trouble with our undercarriage, Nigel. My flipping car keys have slipped down the side of the seat…")

But on top of all that, we've got Biggin Hill to contend with.

Biggin-on-the-bump is, of course (stop sniggering) a bit of an international airport. But mainly it's a place where chaps and chapesses can take off in a small plane and potter about for a few hours on a Saturday or Sunday at a couple of thousand feet.

And where do they do that pottering? Guess.

On the average summer Sunday, the gentle hum of bees in Sevenoaks gardens is drowned by the drone of Piper Cherokees and single-engined Cessnas taking turns to overfly the town and phone home on their mobile.

("Can you see me NOW? Look, I'm wiggling the wings.")

Even at their lowest and noisiest, the big jets don't usually stop conversation in a room (at least, not here in central Sevenoaks. There might be parts of Westerham where people sigh heavily and turn up the volume on Radio 4 every time some captain muddles feet and metres during the approach run to Gatwick).

Small planes, though, fly low and slow, and make your TV picture shiver for long enough to miss the brilliant Hamilton overtaking manoeuvre and subsequent pit-lane penalty.

Instead of FFWWAAAIIOONG, we get BRrrruuuurrrrmmm.

(Help. I wonder if I've divided my readership. I suspect there are some of you muttering "Killjoy" and others fingering their father's service revolver wondering if it still fires every time someone doing a stall-turn in a Tomahawk blots out the last 10 seconds of a Grand Prix.)

Now, I tend to be fairly tolerant of huge planes carrying hundreds of passengers to Corfu or Barcelona, because I'm occasionally one of those, and the last thing I'm thinking up there in FastenSeatbeltLand is how many people I'm mildly bothering on the ground.

But I must admit it niggles that one person with no pressing need to get anywhere is allowed to irritate the population of a whole town, simply for a few hours of personal thrill.

Can I suggest an Air Irritation Compensation Tax?

Airmen, simply drop bundles of used tenners over central Sevenoaks.