It was looking at their pictures in one of the papers that did it.
Researchers have used forensic science to recreate the faces of the crew of the Mary Rose and they were revealed for the first time last week, as if on a Tudor version of Crimewatch.
The bosun looked familiar. "Dad? Is that you?" Since then it's been mayhem. You've been waking up at 3am, shouting: "Cry havoc! Let slip the dogs of war!" and that just sets your own hairy feller off. He charges for the garden, the prospect of a good Tudor scrap making him salivate all over the kitchen floor. Only now you you've been calling it the galley where you've been cooking up great cauldrons of beef and bacon and lamb and sausages and bits of old biscuit all week.
"Come and get it, me hearties!" you bellow, but your family just look at you from the kitchen doorway, your son muttering: "Sad, sad -" You haven't got time to argue. You have to go up to the fo'c'sle to check on the French (in truth, you're not quite sure what a fo'c'sle is. Or even how to spell it. Or where it is. Is it upstairs? You thought it was the little fishing port in Cornwall you visited with your parents when you were a child).
Mary Rose fever has well and truly gripped you. It's understandable. Few would deny that this is a fabulous restoration project. "Is this is a digitally-enhanced, Wi-Fi enabled, state-of-the-art, 21st-century visitor centre I see before me?" If it's all gone to your head a little, then so be it. The drainpipes protruding from your bedroom windows have transformed it into a gun-deck. Anyone can see that. God, you might even open it to visitors yourself. "The gift shop is down the landing, madam. Sorry, was it two ship's biscuits you wanted?" Don't pass the house in a Citroen or a Peugeot is all I can say.
You've been to the garden centre and bought 12 sprinklers that now fan out at the front and back of the house, bathing your property in a permanent fine haze. "To preserve it," you tell the neighbours, proudly. "It replicates what it's been like on the seabed, you see."
When the postman slips on the resulting slick, you scream "Haul him to Keele!" since your daughter's university application has also been on your mind. "Don't you mean keelhaul him, cap'n?" says a neighbour. Ha! The cat o' nine tails would be too lenient for him. "Did someone say 'cat'?" barks the dog.
Only one eventuality could be worse than all this Tudor madness – and that is waking up to discover you are related to David Starkey. Look – even the dog has gone now.
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