Hi, I’m Anne Boleyn

MY old gran had a wonderful philosophy (not that she knew what a philosophy was) — the day you were born, your book was written.

Every choice you make, every route you tread, is all predetermined by a higher being. You die when your page number is up. In practice, this means nothing you do is your fault. At least, that’s how I’ve interpreted it.

She also believed in reincarnation. Not quite like Buddhism where you get reborn as a bug if you were nasty in this life. (There are a few people I know whom I would dearly love to come back as cockroaches...) No, hers is a much less exciting reincarnation which has you return again and again. . . exactly the same. So I am doomed for all eternity to be a fat, middle-aged provincial newspaper journalist.

Makes being a cockroach sound kind of exciting, huh?

I have a theory about reincarnation. The period of history you are most interested in, is the period you last lived. For example: son number three is a Viking fanatic, a reborn King Canute. I’ve expressed my displeasure about rape and pillaging but still he goes out wearing horns on his beanie. Still, it could be worse. He could sit in Blackpool ordering the sea about.

The late Him Indoors was once King Arthur. The new Him Indoors tells me he used to be Gollum from Middle Earth. I don’t think he’s got the idea.

Now me? OK, this is going to need a stretch of your imagination, but if I can do it, so can you. I was Anne Boleyn. The second wife of Henry VIII.

I know this because I was always crap at history except for the early part of the 16th century. Specifically Henry VIII. I could, I suppose, have been him, but I’d far rather be his most manipulative — not to mention beautiful — wife. Far more glamorous to be beheaded than to die of syphilis.

Anyway, all this brings me to the new series of “The Tudors” on Fridays. Now poor Luke has been kicked out of “Big Brother” I had to find something else to watch. And I stumbled across myself. Heaving bosom and all.

Natalie Dormer does a passable impression of me but Jonathan Rhys Meyers is nothing like Henry. Where are his golden curls? Or, for that matter, his height.

There’s cooks being boiled alive and poisonings, nudity and loads of rompings, executions on Tower Hill, incest and plotting. All the ingredients of a blockbuster. And the story continues.

This series we get to see my fall (and at this point I would like to deny all allegations, especially incest... I ask you, the king was clutching at straws) and the next two series deal exclusively with my successors: the insipid Jane Seymour, the ugly-as-sin Anne of Cleeves, the adulterous Katherine Howard and the much-married and rather pious — if that’s not a contradiction in terms I don’t know what is — Katherine Parr.

But first, let’s enjoy my day. . .