Mrs Roomes
Anyone who lives or has lived in Sheffield in the past ten years will know of Mrs Roomes, a proper nutter who used to entertain, insult and scare people in equal measure.

She was a Jamaican lady who had been touched by the hand of God, with the emphasis on 'touched'. She was, at one point, an RE teacher at King Ted's, but she was let go due to being an absolute maniac.

She would regularly hang around town, playing her red and white Stratocaster and singing into a headset microphone, making sure that everyone on Fargate or The Moor could hear the word of the Lord. She had no sense of tune, screeching her hymns in patois as shoppers walked past, amused or appalled.

She also used to give out religious tracts to people as they walked past, proselytising to all and sundry and offering them the key to the kingdom of heaven as they went about their business.

All fairly harmless, if occasionally annoying. However, she had a darker side: I saw her a few times on the bus haranguing Muslim women wearing veils, telling them that their religion was satanic and heretic and that they were on a sure route to the pits of Hell. She would be quite aggressive in her verbal attacks, making everyone on the bus uncomfortable and occasionally raising the ire of fellow passengers or the driver so much that she'd be ejected from the bus.

So, an eccentric, certainly. Perhaps even a rogue and villain, too, particularly if you followed a religion other than Christianity. She was deported to Jamaica due to visa complications, and what the city lost in Saturday afternoon religious entertainment, it gained in slightly less harassment for its Muslim population.
( CaptainCrackerjack live trout, slow motion, Fri 28 Sep 2012, 10:48, 2 replies)

Is she the one who could almost always be seen somewhere on Fargate singing hymns?
I wondered where she'd gone.
( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Fri 28 Sep 2012, 12:18, closed)

That's the one.

( CaptainCrackerjack live trout, slow motion, Fri 28 Sep 2012, 12:20, closed)