And your saintlike face and your ghostlike soul

I dreamed of the Marsh-King, the mummy-king dead a thousand years in his snail's shell of pitch. (I paraphrase Hans Christian Andersen. It strikes me now that Seamus Heaney's "The Tollund Man" and "The Grauballe Man" might describe this mud-resined body: he . . . seems to weep / the black river of himself.) He rattled in his shrouds, like a sailor wrapped for the deeps. His eyes had dried to plum-pits in his skull, but they moved as restlessly as a sleeper's under his shrunken lids. His tongue had been sewn into his mouth; when he spoke to me, I saw the catgut stitches in the meat. I don't know what he said. His hands had turned to leather clutching things that made no sense in the dream, the bundled spikes of an umbrella, a branch of copper leaves. He leaned up in the attic window like a figurehead stored away, an inherited, inconvenient piece of furniture, but time glued the air dark around him: his teeth were stained with it. There were no lotuses.

Because it was the day after Thanksgiving, my mother and I went last night to see The Queen (2006), which I thought was excellent. Since I owe most of my knowledge of the House of Windsor to fleurdelis28, I am not particularly qualified to judge the portrayals of the various characters, but Helen Mirren struck me as uncanny and I loved the straightforward ways in which the movie presented the private lives of public figures—which are not particularly romantic to themselves, and therefore neither to the eye of this camera. I'm sure there are movies somewhere in which the scene of royalty in a bathrobe is significant, but here it's because if you get someone unexpectedly out of bed at four in the morning, what else are they going to put on? It's not a revelation that the dishes in the Prime Minister's sink need as much washing as anyone else's. There's a close relationship between scenery and pageantry, and here the emphasis is always on the people. Who are characters, not caricatures, no matter how much or how little the audience may agree with their positions; nor does the movie come down particularly on anybody's side, although our sympathies are certainly tilted away from the public's grief and toward the stunned royal family and the harried Prime Minister: "Will someone please save these people from themselves? Because, as Prime Minister, I really have nothing better to do!" (Ah, for the heady days when Tony Blair hadn't yet shaken hands with Bush . . . The Queen would make a very good double feature with Mrs. Brown (1997), but I fear Blair will not be as fondly remembered as Disraeli.) And I spent the entire movie wondering why Michael Sheen looked so familiar, before I looked him up and realized that I'd seen him as Mozart in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus at the Old Vic in 1999, with David Suchet as Salieri: I was delighted.* But don't see The Queen for him. It's an ensemble piece, and all its pieces work beautifully together, but the movie does belong to its title character. We came home and my mother showed me the program and pamphlet she'd kept since the coronation of Elizabeth II, when my mother was seven years old and lived in Oklahoma and even so it was a world-changing event when the new ruler of England was crowned. I could recognize the young woman in those photographs from the film I had just seen. That's sorcery.

Thanksgiving was small and, for a blessing, restful. My father and I were cooking right up until the last moment; my personal contributions were a butternut squash and spinach gratin, and biscuits made with scallions and cheese. My brother's best friend, who by this point is family, dropped by with his girlfriend after dinner. My grandfather was there. "Alice's Restaurant" was played. We watched Ghostbusters (1984), because it was on television, and three episodes of Invader Zim (2001—2002), and the last half-hour of a tribute to the leading men of British comedy that left me with about four different series I now want to watch. Oh, turkey. You have made our refrigerator an ever-replenishable source of food. It's a little scary, actually: I am convinced that there is more turkey in there than the physical bird can account for. It's like the Midas touch, with tryptophan.

I get to see the best cousins ever tonight.

*Also from the Department of I'm Glad They're Not Starving: Julian Firth, for whom I have a wholly irrational fondness based on his performance as Brother Jerome in Cadfael (1994—1998), shows up in a minor role as one of Blair's staff. But why did it take me until now to realize that Roger Allam, whom I saw here as Sir Robin Janvrin and earlier this year as Prothero in V for Vendetta, has been on my computer for years as Javert in the original cast of Les Misérables?