Category: Manly Stuff
This is my friend Adolf, the VW Golf that recently took me and my wife all over the UK. Our relationship (with Adolf, not my wife) was strained.
I spent eight years on active duty as an Army officer, which involved a great deal of travel. Truth be known, all that time away from home was the biggest reason Uncle Sam and I amicably parted company. I realized I could either be an Army helicopter pilot or I could be a husband and father, but I couldn’t be both. I don’t regret the decision.
Most of those trips were to unpleasant places. Once there, the transportation I used typically sported rotors, tracks, and/or belt-fed automatic weapons. However, some of that was actually to places where normal people live, which often involved rental cars.
Rental Car Dogma
Something I learned as a young soldier was that rental cars are always the fastest cars on the highway, and they will go anywhere. If the Army rents it for you and it’s not in your name, then parking tickets are not real, either. The government trusted us with $30-million combat aircraft. Surely, we could be responsible with a low-mileage Ford Fungus. Um, nope …
In my defense, we never actually lost or destroyed one of them. I have pulled up to a hotel in a rental car with the trunk packed full of machine guns, but typically, no one was the wiser. If those parking tickets actually accrue interest over time, then I’ll blame it on those horrible Warrant Officers. They always were a bad influence.
The European Connection
I’ve been to the UK a few times, technically for work. What you’re currently reading is part of that. At least, that’s what I’m telling the IRS. Thanks for that, by the way.
Several years ago, I rented a nifty little Vauxhall. Vauxhall is a British car company headquartered in Chilton, Bedfordshire. My little Vauxhall was the tiniest car they made. It had a standard transmission and a most remarkable personality.
Modern automobiles talk to you. I once read that a new-production car contains between 2,500 and 3,500 microchips. For an American driving in the UK on the wrong side of the road with weird street signs and ubiquitous sheep cluttering up the motorways, audible navigation aids are a lifesaver.
All the major machines in the Dabbs family get their own names, and that extends to rental cars. We named our little Vauxhall Victoria.
Victoria was the perfect woman. She was smart, patient, forgiving, and more than a wee bit sultry. She sounded like a Bond girl. Had I not been traveling with my wife, I might have developed an undue attachment to Victoria. That’s just as well. There’s no way she would have fit in my carry-on bag for the trip back home.
During this most recent trip, the rental car company issued us a spanking new VW Golf. Unlike Victoria, this Golf and I did not get along well. I named him Adolf.
This really is a typical two-way road in the UK. They all seemed to have been made by the Romans and just weren’t built to accommodate automobiles.
Adolf’s God Complex
Adolf took his job way too seriously. He was a beautiful little four-door blue car with all the bells and whistles, and I mean all of them. When I picked him up, the radio was on. Fifteen minutes of frustration later, I Googled, “How do I turn off the radio on a 2024 VW Golf?” The first hit that came up was titled, “How do I turn this freaking radio off!?!” Pro tip: You swipe left over the power button, like that was somehow obvious. It was an ignominious start to our subsequently rocky relationship.
Adolf was inexplicably designed to help me drive. He would make helpful little control inputs into the steering wheel if he didn’t like the way I was doing it. He would chime and tell me to “Drive in the center of the road” if he felt I was not doing so. One time, no kidding, he flashed a warning across the dash that said, “Take your foot off of the accelerator!” Really?
I am not the kind of guy who shouts at traffic. Such a lack of emotional control always seemed like a reflection of poor character. However, this is a transcript of an actual conversation between Adolf and me early on in our relationship: “Adolf, dude, seriously? One of us needs to be the car, and the other needs to be the driver. You get to pick which one you want to be, but you’ll need to stick with it, brother. If you keep screwing with me while I’m driving, we’re both going to get hurt.”
It’s Not Entirely Adolf’s Fault
England is a lovely place. Outside of London, the place is spotlessly clean, and the people are diagnosably polite. That’s a good thing. Otherwise, the ghastly roads would kill them all.
The whole country is cursed with 3,000 years worth of history. That means all the roads, and I do mean all of them, were designed for horses. They are now ridiculously narrow and irrevocably encompassed in tall stone hedges. No kidding, lots of two-way roads in the UK are narrow enough for me to reach out and touch both sides with my outstretched arms.
If you meet an oncoming car, one of you has to stop and back up until you reach a lay-by where you can pull aside. If we Americans suddenly all found ourselves driving in England, half of us would be immolated in fiery car crashes in a week. The other half would succumb to unfettered road rage.
Ruminations
Don’t get me started on parking. There are rumored to be about three free parking spaces in the entire country, but I never could find them. Everything else has a handy electronic machine where you touch a credit card, get a little printout, and post it on your dashboard. They call it “Pay and Display.”
However, pay little heed to any of those complaints. The UK is one of the coolest places I have ever been. The history runs unimaginably deep, and my wife loves it there. Perhaps the next time we can go back, I’ll even find hot little Miss Victoria waiting for us in the car park.
From Splendid Isolation:
If you’re anything like me, you’ll be wanting a cigarette after reading this lovely little story — even if like me you don’t smoke.
An intruder who used brass knuckles to beat against a front door and break a window just before midnight Friday in Missouri was shot multiple times by the homeowner and killed.
KFVS 12 reported that the homeowner, Austin Glastetter, was in the house with his wife at the time of the incident.
Glastetter told the suspect, 31-year-old John Fisher, that he was armed, but Fisher allegedly responded by saying, “You’ll have to kill me.”
Wait, wait, hold it in for just a minute…
Glastetter then shot Fisher multiple times.
And:
The Scott County Sheriff’s Office issued a release noting that deputies arrived on the scene to find Fisher deceased.
Smoke ’em if you got ’em…
The Romans knew well from that time that victory over the enemy began with logistics
What was inside the legendary “sarcina”, the backpack that carried the Empire on its shoulders.
Imagine marching for tens of kilometers under the scorching sun, wearing heavy armor, a shield, a sword… and carrying a backpack that weighed more than 13 kilos.
This was the daily life of the Roman legionary. And this backpack was called precisely sarcina.
Much more than a simple weight, the sarcina was a symbol of discipline, resilience and autonomy of the most feared army of antiquity. Each soldier was trained to be almost an individual army on the move.
But what was inside the sarcina?
The Romans knew that victory began with logistics. So each legionary carried with him the essentials to camp, feed himself, shelter himself and survive for days, all on his shoulders.
Here’s what a Roman soldier carried:
●Dolabra (shovel/tile): used to dig trenches and build fortifications.
● Wooden poles (sweats): with these, they quickly erected defensive fences around the camps.
● Water ramp and clay or leather containers for carrying liquids.
● Portable mill: a stone mill to grind their own grain and produce their basic food ration.
● Iron frying pan, spoon and knife: for cooking and eating in the countryside.
● Rations: usually raw grain, dried meat, hard cheese, vinegar (mixed with water to purify) and even dried figs.
● Wool blanket or sheet (sagum): essential against the cold and rain.
● Spare tunic and personal items, such as coins, amulets or cards.
● Hygiene and sewing kit: because even an empire needs clean soldiers and tunics in good condition.
And all of this was tied together perfectly in a wooden frame, like a cross, fixed to a stick called a furca, which the soldier rested on his shoulder.
The most impressive thing is that these men walked for days, carrying everything, with the same rigidity and order with which they dominated the battlefields.
They were called, with a hint of sarcasm, “Marius’ mules”, in reference to General Gaius Marius, who reformed the Roman army and imposed that each soldier was responsible for his own equipment. A simple move, but one that transformed the Roman legion into a ruthless war machine.
The sarcina was not just a backpack. It was a symbol.
A reminder that Rome’s strength did not come only from swords, but from the ability of each man to stand, march and fight with everything he needed on his back.
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