February 16 2026

Midterm mania

And Finally

What Freud would say about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s teddy bears

It is widely known that when a Duke of York is down, he is down, and the recent hit-piece in Heat – "'Pathetic' Andrew’s tantrums over prized teddy bears" – found a new way of kicking Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Its royal source said that "being forced to move [out of Royal Lodge] has sent him into a full-on meltdown because he keeps telling people the bears won’t cope with the change… as he says, it’s their home too." When it was reported last month that Andrew’s teddy bear collection was being sent to a south London storage facility, I was on the verge of feeling sorry for him; until I realized I was actually feeling sorry for the bears. There are no wonderful games to play in a lock-up. Of course I anthropomorphize teddy bears: that is what they are for.

Dot Wordsworth

Do only bitches bitch?

‘How many letters?’ asked my husband, as though it were a crossword we were doing together. ‘Five,’ I replied. ‘Begins in b, ends in h.’ The clue, according to the Daily Telegraph, was that the head of Norfolk county council had told opponents not to ‘b---h and moan’. ‘Belch?’ asked my husband optimistically, adding at intervals, in exactly the same hopeful tone: ‘Blush? Birch? Bunch? Bleach?’ ‘Too many letters,’ I replied to the last suggestion. Obviously the intended word was bitch. But I wondered why it had to be blanked out. Is bitch taboo in every sense? Would it be blanked out in the Crufts sense of a female dog? The doublet ‘bitch and moan’ is quite common.