FOR the past few weeks, I've been going to bed with a tall, dark and handsome military man, which could be misconstrued, Sir being of middling height, fair and a civilian.

Fortunately - or maybe unfortunately for the pockets of the legal profession - my dashing bedfellow lives between the hard covers of histories and he rode into my life through the pages of a novel set during the Civil War.

As such heroes go, Prince Rupert of the Rhine is in the first rank and he's got me reading serious history again.

Now that is trendy, history today being up there with rock and roll - think Simon Schama and David Starkey sorting it into tasty bites, not stodgy platefuls. Think Adam Hart-Davis describing what everyone did for us and Fred Dibnah enthusing over anything from medieval masons to Victorian engineering. Think TV's Meet the Ancestors and Time Team.

You can't escape from it. Given much of the present, you might not want to, and there are even those who slide through a wormhole in time at weekends.

On Easter Sunday I had a long chat with the Commanding Officer of Col Laghtnan's Regiment of Foote in his deep-cuffed, skirted seventeenth century coat, and breeches.

Raised in Ireland by the Earl of Antrim, the regiment had come to England to join Montrose in Scotland for the Royalist cause, he explained.

His men were around him, though the sight of a Royalist, fancy shirt, full rusty-red breeches and all, belting out Putting on the Ritz on a piano accordion in a pub took anachronism to new heights.

What I'd forgotten about a post-lunch folk session in the pub at Manfield, just outside Darlington, was that members of Civil War re-enactors The Sealed Knot were also going to be around.

The CO is Nick Gray, sealed into the knot for the past 18 years and a customs and excise officer in the day job.

At Manfield, destined to become familiar to a regiment whose members are from as far apart as Yorkshire and Herefordshire, Durham and London, the troops were training and discussing the year ahead, including which of The Sealed Knot's many appearances nationwide they would attend.

It isn't all dressing up to relive Cavaliers v Roundheads. "We do a lot with schools," Nick told me. "Children can be hard work; interesting them in the history of this country is difficult but, when they are interested, they ask harder and more striking questions than the adults."

For himself, he'd like to know more about the role of women during the Civil War - although we both knew about the redoubtable Lady Derby, who defied the besiegers of her home, Lathom House, time has dusted over the lives of the wives of pikemen and musketeers, left to cope with home and family when the men went off to fight.

The regiment's women followers are known, by the way, as the Filth Sisters - but who could think unkind thoughts about an organisation whose flyer to attract women members carries the question: "Does my bum look big enough in this?" - buxomness being the in thing of the period.

My family, peasants on both sides, would no doubt have been in the pikemen and musketeers category, though I suspect they'd have been with t'other lot; I'm from Cromwell country.

Wish I had a wormhole back to them, that would be living history.