@cudgee
I thought
flatblackcapo
would enjoy this account of an early London cyclist who was accosted by a fellow who ‘apparently had been imbibing’ and who ‘addressed some insulting remarks to her’.
The Illustrated Police News of July 1899, reported that she ‘immediately alighted... and gave him a sound thrashing, using her fists in Scientific Fashion, to the delight of several colliers who happened to be passing’.
The young woman, who was ‘believed to be a Bolton Lady, noted for her Athletic Powers, then rode off towards Tydesley’ and into the ranks of those wonderful, nameless characters in the marginalia of English literature, like Coleridge’s infamous ‘
Man from Porlock’, and
DeQuincy’s anonymous Malay, who appeared at the door of his cottage in Grasmere in Cumbria’s Lake District in 1812, and shared some opium with him - enough to kill ‘three dragoons and their horses’ - then ‘lay on the floor for about an hour, before pursuing his journey’.
Took the big 'un out for a bowl of Vietnamese Pho.