RAF Chinooks To Be Fitted With Enormous Buckets

In a week when the country was told that its Chinook helicopters and A400M transport planes will be dropping water on wildfires from next summer, Britain quietly accepted that its most sophisticated military hardware, built at enormous expense to do things nobody is allowed to describe in print, will now spend its afternoons carrying a bucket, which is a sentence the Ministry of Defence has not denied because nobody has had the heart to ask it.

The bucket is the part the country cannot get past. A Chinook costs more than every house on an average street put together and has two rotors, which is one more rotor than most helicopters consider necessary, and the plan is to hang a bag under it and fly it at a burning hillside. This is correct. It is also, when said out loud in a car park, extremely funny, and roughly sixty per cent of the nation has now spent at least one evening imagining the moment the pilot lets go.

A man in Oxfordshire who keeps a pond liner in his garage has written to offer it.

"I'm not saying they should use mine," he said. "I'm saying mine is available, it holds water, and it has never once been used for anything else. If the RAF want it they can have it. I would want it back."