Always a keen ethnographer of religion, Alan Bennett documents the ritual paraphernalia of calendrical observancess in a diary entry for 2007:

17 May. Outside the bank I see the local vicar, his arms full of balloons and a Sooty teddy bear in the crook of his arm. “It’s Ascension Day,” he explains.

Pursuing the teddy bear theme, AB reflects on his own innocuous image:

20 December. […] I shall still be thought to be kindly, cosy, and essentially harmless. I am in the pigeon-hole marked “no threat”, and did I stab Judy Dench with a pitchfork I should still be a teddy bear.