A group of fitness fans are rueing not reading the small print, after signing up for an exercise ‘bootcamp’.
While some had been prepared appear in lycra on Facebook, few were quite so ready to completely replace the British armed forces.
Bootcamps can involve incredible hardships, such as jogging in parks or doing press-ups near dog shit.
“We’d just watched a warm-up video about star jumps”, revealed Jean Evans of Harold, “and then we all did a stretch and practiced our puffing.
“But then a bald, red-faced man with a ‘tache started shouting quite mean things about Jean’s bingo wings, and made us strip down an SA80 assault rifle while pelting us with peanuts.”
Evans and her friends Glenda and Wincie can’t recall exactly what happened next, but felt they were unprepared to defend an entire village of Kurds.
“It’s freezing at night and we’ve got terrible equipment”, complained Evans. “My iPhone’s gone flat and the top on my water bottle is threaded. I signed up for ‘bums and tums’, not ‘bombs and Tornadoes’. The government keeps talking about boots on the ground, but so far they haven’t mentioned trainers.”
Defence secretary Michael Fallon has pledged to return the group to the UK, just as soon as the Iraqi army has been trained well enough to replace them. “On the plus side, I’ve lost just over three pounds so far”, declared Evans. “So I think I’ll give it another week.”
