When I was 20-ish I went to all sorts of dodgy places and sometimes found my self in bad situations, like the time I got a broken nose and two black eyes from one punch by a drunk squaddie on leave, or when I had a gun held to my head (it turned out to be a starting pistol; you can read about it in "The Who: I Was There").
So I bought a small book on judo and taught myself a few moves. This helped make me very much more self-confident; there was an occasion in the bar on Eel Pie Island where much to the amazement of my friends I calmly stepped in between two guys fighting, to help up a girl who had been knocked off her chair.
Now to the slender relevance of this post: I was relating my new skills to one of the girls in the group I knocked about with, and she was keen to try it. She was nearly as tall as me and well-built, not overweight but big. I showed her how to hold the collar and arm, and twist around, to which she said, "Like this?" and I found myself somersaulting through the air and landing on my back on the pavement. My point is, it can do no harm to learn a bit of self defence.
