The perfect date....is definitely this one - Hortense's account of the date

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If she’d had a mirror, Hortense would have been delighted at the result her hours of pampering and preening had achieved. Mirrors were a lethal weapon where she came from so she had to make do with checking out her appearance in the shop window on the way to her date. The new pink hair colour clashed a little with her rheumy bloodshot eyes but no matter, the inch thick rim of black Alice Cooper style eyeliner she’d applied detracted from it a little. “You look gorgeous, it’ll be lurrrrrvvve at first sight, just you wait and see”, her fellow inmate and friend MOB assured her before waving her off through the secret tunnel they had dug together from their high security cell.

The bright lime coloured coat she was wearing went a treat with the plaid yellow skirt she and Mob had fashioned out of prison sacks that they had purloined and dyed especially for the date. The pointy black leather Madonna like bra, size 54dddd, was holding up just fine and she chuckled at the nipple tassels as they swung from side to side. “Touch of class that”, she thought, as she sashayed her way down the street. She tended to favour walking with one leg on the road and her other much shorter one on the pavement. That way she could minimise the excessive limp that made her quite self conscious. It was hard getting decent shoes when your feet were a size 11 but she was delighted with the sparkly pink ‘feck me pumps’ that she was now wearing; the ones she had arm wrestled off Lilly Savage on a pub crawl some years ago.

She was both excited and nervous and she stopped to take a sniff of her armpits to make sure all was well. She smelled good; thank God for only this morning she’d been able to trade her last packet of extra large sized Cuban cigars for a bottle of Brut after shave. She hoped Simondo would like it; she’d dabbed it all over just in case she got lucky and they decided to exchange bodily fluids. She wasn’t a cheap girl, but these days getting a sniff of any kind of male bodily contact was a rarity so any action kicking off and she’d be in there big time.


Noticing the time on the town hall clock, she saw she was running late and put a spurt on – she was always amazed at how the road cleared before her when she lurched ahead at speed. At 6’4” she was used to people throwing themselves in the path of traffic when they saw her hurtling towards them. “Perhaps it hadn’t been a good idea to take the extra time to sew the tassels to the leather bra that Mob had made from the leather restraints that she had chewed through earlier this morning”, she worried, whilst praying that Simondo would wait for her.

Walking into the ‘Best Kebab place in town’ Hortense stopped to scan the room to find her paramour. In an instant their eyes met and she almost recognised him from the picture he had sent to her but dear God, where there had been hair before now looked like some comb-over crop-circle kind of hairdo happening. “Jesus Christ”, she thought, “that photo he sent was definitely a sepia coloured archive, he’d clearly tried to knock ten years off himself, by the look of things”. Simondo beamed an almost toothless smile and waved at Hortense before standing up to greet her. “Oh for feck sake, he’s a fecking midget that must weigh all of 8 stone with teeth like a bloody bar-chart. Just wait till I get my hands on that git Sy”, she promised herself; “tall dark and handsome, my arse”. Wide eyed with shock, she wanted to bolt but it was too late and you don’t get far wearing “feck me pumps” with one leg shorter than the other. “Oh well it’s a night out”, she reasoned,” may as well be nice to the wee geezer. At least he turned up but I needn’t have worn my lucky leather thong after all", she sighed philosophically.

Simondo walked forward to ‘air kiss’ Hortense but at 5’4” with lifts in his shoes, he had to stretch mightily high just to reach her neck. She bent down to engulf him in a huge bear hug. “Aw shite”, he cried as something landed and rolled along the floor. Hortense drew back for she realised her pointy bra had poked Simondo right in the eye. “But what eye?”, she asked herself, as she stared into a blank socket where his eye had been only seconds before. In an instant Simondo dropped to the floor to retrieve his glass eye; a task made more onerous due to the missing thumb and index finger on his right hand.

Dropping his guts in a rip roarer of the loudest fart ever heard, Simondo stopped his search for his eye to use his good hand to waft away the overpowering pong that was filling the immediate area. “Sorry”, he said, turning his head around and grinning toothlessly at her. Hortense retched violently and made to sit down lest she fainted. “For the love of God, Simondo, you must be a bloody vegetarian because nothing smells worse than a vegetarian’s fart and that’s the worst vegetarian’s fart I’ve ever chewed on”, she said, as she sat licking what tasted like raw sewage from her teeth. "Err, yeah sorry, that'll be the cabbage soup that I had at lunch time", replied Simondo, who was busy busting a gut laughing at her reaction as he resumed his search for his glass eye.

After knocking back a double scotch to disinfect her mouth and recovering her equilibrium somewhat, Hortense relaxed and watched Simondo grapple for his eye. It hadn’t helped that the hoodie sitting at the next table surreptitiously kicked the eye just out of reach of Simondo’s good hand at which point he winked at Hortense for he was enjoying the show. Hortense winked back in thanks for whilst Simondo was on all fours, she was admiring the generous builders bum cleavage he was showing. She almost shrieked with joy for she could clearly see a tattoo of Ted Bundy on his right arse cheek. “Oh, could this man be any more perfect for me?”, she asked herself, as her heart soared to new heights and she forgave his other short comings. Perhaps he wasn’t last prize in the 2008 ugly contest after all. Finding his eye, Simondo gave it a quick lick and popped it back in his socket and stood up. Feeling that the fart had broken the ice he was less self conscious about his eye popping out. He unconsciously scratched his nuts and feeling at one with himself sat down at the table to schmooze this lovely lady he was so lucky to be having dinner with.

In Hortense’s view, the evening was a success. How he made her laugh with his stories about farting on the girls in the office; “his favourite trick”, he told her, "was pumping out a silent but violent fart only to walk away unseen then watch as several screeching girls got stuck in the doorway together trying to evacuate the area at speed". Man, they roared their heads off in laughter at that one. Slowly but surely, Hortense was falling for him and whilst the alcohol took its toll and the beer goggles did their work, she saw a knight in shining armour sit before her. She even found it endearing that he had a permanent nasal drip and a snarly that hung from one nostril like a drop pearl earring only to slip back up into his nostril when he breathed in, then drop back down again as he breathed out..

Sighing deeply and with regret, Hortense knew that she had to leave for a change of shift soon meant alert warders and more chance of being caught breaking back into the secure unit. She didn’t want to risk losing her privileges and she was so looking forward to receiving her new pair of incontinence pants that the governor had promised her for good behaviour.

Saying goodbye outside the restaurant, she was careful not to poke Simondo in the eye again as they hugged – he’d no chance of finding that bloody eye out here amongst the piles of litter that so defined the sink estate they were next to. Simondo pleaded with her not to go but it was useless and they both knew it. “Next time my pretty", she reassured him. To placate him and remind him of what he would be missing she wrapped herself round the nearest lamppost where she performed her own specially choreographed rendition of ‘don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me’, just for him. Clinging to her leg like a dog in heat, Hortense wrenched him off and turned to leave. As she lurched along the road, she knew she had met ‘The One’ and her heart broke as every step took her further and further away from him. She knew he wasn’t bright, God knows his father must have left half of him down his leg, given the extent of his arrested development; she knew he had some special challenges to overcome in his life, “but with her love and help, they would make it together", she resolved.

“Perhaps Simindo's roomate Sy had been right all along”, she thought smiling, wondering what kind of gift he would like by way of a thanks.......


*****"Vote for MOB, Vote for MOB", Hortense called out to Simondo as she entered the tunnel that took her back inside...

*****To get Simodo's account of the date visit the hilarious Wheel turning, hamster dead blog********

*****To visit our excellent best of blogs funniest blog award campaign manager, visit the fabulously witty Debs of The Lehners in France. You won't be sorry***** .

'The One'

Simondo woke with a screaming headache and wondered what had interrupted his slumber. Lying half awake in a room that was dimly lit from the emerging dawn outside, he rubbed his eyes with the back of his balled fists and could just make out last night’s discarded metallic curry dishes strewn on the cluttered and battered old piece of car-boot quality furniture that his slum-landlord laughingly called a ‘coffee table’.

The beep of his cell phone brought him quickly to a new level of consciousness. He rolled over and checked out the alarm clock; bright red digital numbers showing 05.30am burned through the half dark at him. Reaching out to the side table he groped around for the phone to see who the hell was texting him at this time of the morning. .

“Bugger it”, he said in exasperation as he realised it wasn’t there and that he’d have to get out of bed to locate it. He badly wanted to roll over and slip back into his alcohol binge induced coma, but there was no chance of getting back to sleep with all that intermittent beeping going on. Lying there for a moment he scratched his permanently itchy nether regions before letting out a fart that made the windows of his room rattle. He chuckled because he regularly enjoyed a good scratch and never more so when followed by a rip roaring fart in front of the girls in the office; “it made the slow days of being a computer operator pass more enjoyably”, he thought.

“God what a bloody awful hangover”, he groaned as he lay there allowing his eyes to become accustomed to the multitude of shadows that the early dawn light cast into his room through the single thickly woven burgundy curtain, that when pulled to its limits, only just managed to cover the grimy sash window. Pulling the covers back, he shivered as the cold air hit his body. Quickly locating his discarded once white but now grimy gray underpants on the floor, he pulled them on in an attempt to clothe himself against the icy draft coming in through the decaying wooden window frames. In theory this might have worked but for the huge hole in the rear of his pants that completely negated any benefit he might have gleaned from his action. Johnny Fartpants had nothing on this guy.

Lurching through the debris of abandoned odd socks, worn underwear, beer cans and old pizza boxes, he searched furiously for the perpetrator of the hugely annoying beep that had forced him out of his pit. Its incessant intrusion into his hung-over consciousness was beginning to irritate him and he swore loudly as he stubbed his toe blindly and hard against the coffee table. Holding his toe and falling back onto the old black leatherette sofa, a relic from the 1970’s, he let out a huge groan and swore further as he caught his right butt cheek on the protruding spring that had broken loose through the non fireproof foam and the broken leatherette covering.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph”, he called out in agony, “if that spring’s damaged my tattoo of Ted Bundy then I’ll swing for that bloody landlord”, he promised with a malevolent sneer on his face. It had been a bone of contention between them that the old miser refused to shell out for something that you could safely sit on without injuring your back passage. Standing up, his toe hurt and throbbed, but his butt cheek was more in need of attention given how much he revered his tattoo and what it had cost him – five weekends of double shift overtime before he could complete the whole work; that and not to mention not being able to sit down for three days when the tattoo artist had done his thing. Furthermore, it had been annoying having to think up excuses as to why he needed to stand for eight hours a day when those silly giggling girls in the office made fun of him – all those references to him having piles and needing a rubber ring to sit down wore thin. But that was nothing compared to this, Christ this was a travesty, all that money and agony and for what?; a bloody spring to scar his butt cheek and make a total mockery of all that he’d gone through to have his hero permanently etched on his bum cheek. He rubbed his butt hard and winced as pain shot down the back of his leg. Just as he was about to examine the damage in the cracked dusty mirror perched on top of a table, the beep of the phone reminded him of his original purpose for being out of bed.

Listening more intently now that he was fully awake, his eyes scanned the room and rested on his black leather jacket draped over the back of a dining chair. “Oh bollocks, it’s probably still in there after getting home from doing that eight hour pub crawl with Sy last night”, he spat bad temperedly, as he limped over to check his jacket pockets.

Pulling the phone from his pocket, he squinted to see who’d woken him and been the cause of so much injury in the space of five minutes. Just at that moment, the phone sprang into action and an unknown number flashed up on the screen. He jumped back at the suddenness of the phone playing the Nolan Sisters ‘I’m in the mood for dancing’ theme that he’d especially chosen as his ring tone. What was merely seconds but felt like an age he stood motionless wondering what the emergency was for someone to be so bloody rude to wake him so early. With a flick of the thumb he pressed answer and barked “Who the bloody hell is this then?”, trying to sound menacing whilst stretching his five foot four frame as tall as he could possibly get.

“Hello, It’s me, Hortense, calling about our date”, said a voice that sounded more like a deep menacing baritone voice from a film trailer for an American horror movie.

He felt a warm glow engulf him as recognition set in. “So this was the babe that Sy had told him about, boy was he excited to meet her and the sooner the better. Who cared if she had woken him at such an ungodly hour, from what Sy had said, she could be ‘the one’” he thought excitedly, as he limped back to lie on his bed..

“Well hello there babe”, he drawled back at her with a strong and suddenly acquired mid-Atlantic accent. “When are you free babe?; what day suits you best?", he asked, whilst unconsciously scratching an area he ought not to.

“Free?”, she asked rhetorically; “probably in about five years what with good behaviour thrown in, but for you darlin’, my pretty, I’ll give up my weekends with Mob”.

Thrilled at the prospect of meeting ‘the one’, knowing that she too had a tattoo of Jeffrey Dahmer on her left arse cheek and hearing what he thought might just be the sound of a whip cracking in the background, he capitulated and offered her every weekend she wanted for the rest of his life....All she had to do was accept............. His heart beat with wild anticipation as Barry White's Love's theme coursed through his mind.

He couldn’t wait to surprise her with a gift of his very own favourite Argos’s own brand cologne that he had bought on impulse for her only the day before. Who cared if those imbecilic girls in the office said it smelled of fly-spray, on her it would smell devine..........

"Let me check my social diary and I'll get back to you", she rasped huskily at him. "But first, you have to come over to the dark side, have to promise me you'll vote for MOB, vote for MOB", she repeated as she let out a deep mwahahahahahahahahaha type laugh before hanging up the line...

****Readers please note - Simondo is a fictional character and doesn't relate to anyone alive, barely alive, dead, about to be exhumed, or contacted as part of a seance. As for Hortense............****