It's not like he'd fight four armed men just for the halibut.
Englishman John Wood, 37, told the Wisbech Standard he fought off four muggers singlehandedly -- literally, since his other hand was clutching a container of fish and chips he had just purchased.
While the story almost sounds too unbelievable to be true, who are we to question a Brit's valiant defense of his fish and chips? Wood said he had just walked out of Frank's Fish & Chip Shop in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire on Thursday when four men approached and asked for his wallet.
Wood told the BBC that his phone happened to go off at that exact moment, and the muggers demanded he hand it over in addition to the wallet.
"The irony," Wood said, "was it was my fiancee who messaged me saying, 'be careful -- it's dangerous out there'."
Wood says he told the attackers to "come and get it," and the four men all rushed at him at once. Not one to let himself get battered, Wood reportedly used the aikido skills he learned as a teen to kick two of them in the knees, sending them to the ground.
By Wood's account, he knocked down a third before the fourth man stabbed him in the side with what doctors believe was a sharpened screwdriver. He then disarmed the man, he added, before jumping in his car and driving away.
"I didn't even drop the chips,' he told the Standard. "It was all done one-handed."
His fiancee, Claire Upton, told the BBC that Wood arrived home and initially refused to go to the hospital, but later drove himself there.
Police are still investigating the incident.
While Wood's tale might sound like a load of bollocks--or in this case "pollocks"--even crazier self-defense stories have been reported.
In August, a 7-year-old girl in Atlanta was saved from a would-be kidnapper when her 12-year-old sister and another girl, age 9, sprang to her aid.
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