Gadjo’s Top Vampires

Noted vampire chaser and scholar No Good Boyo has recently raised the subject of vampires from its coffin. As I live in Transylvania, people - or the “un-undead”, as I’m required to call them - often ask me about vampires. “What are they really like?”, “Do you know any personally?”, “Can you get my friend Tina a date with one??” etc etc... Oh it really does get tiresome. So, to satisfied people's prurience - yes, alright, my own included - I've composed a top five list of vampires. The fact that they're all female and have no proven track record of vampirism is neither here nor there.

#5 Nigella Lawson

Gentleman Gyppo Byard recommended Ms Lawson’s book How To Be A Domestic Goddess so I bought it for Mrs Dilo for Christmas. Sadly, the cover picture is not of the raven-haired raver herself but of a fairy cake, but one could still imagine her as a vampire if one wanted to, and the recipes do look rather enticing. As the late Humph Lyttelton said: “Bakewell, tart!”.

#4 Spampyra

a.k.a. The Soup Dragon. A dinner lady we used to have at skool. She dished up the liver and onions, boiled cabbage, custard, “pink sauce” (eh, what was that?), toads (individual toad-in-the-holes), gravy and, yes, Spam fritters. Maybe she wasn’t a vampire at all but her hair was always a mess which is a sure sign that she couldn’t see her reflection in the mirror of a morning.

#3 Frøken X

X was a real woman I knew in Denmark, stunningly attractive as a fairytale princess, tall with high cheekbones and long blond hair. She was also several loaves short of a bread basket. She invited me to dinner once and after we’d eaten the soup she'd made and listened to Bowie records she started laughing manically about ways in which she could do away with her father. She then married an eminently unpleasant and expendable chap who died of unknown causes a few months later.

#2 Fennella Fielding

Frying Tonight!! Vampish actress and one of the few truly horny things in pre-Summer-of-Love Britain. I also have loving memories of her in The Poetry Society episode of Hancock’s Half Hour. She’s got actual Romanian blood in her, and “never married” – we all know what that means... I reckon No Good Boyo does, and it’s really only to leave Fennella for his own more expert consideration that she doesn’t quite make the #1 spot here.

#1 Kate Bush

Kate Bush is not a vampire, she is the woman I loved, but she has long dark hair and dances like a maniac so she’ll do as a vampire. As a teenager I used to lie feverishly awake at night listening to her songs on my portable cassette player, so everything I know about women (and therefore vampires) I learnt from Kate. It was also for her that I started going to expressionist mime classes – bless!