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Autumn Statement

One life, one legend, lots of gaps

Not quite up to this month’s London Marathon? Try one of the shorter – or sillier – races in our selection

Having given us Battersea Park Road's answer to happiness and men, Losada now jumps though some New Age hoops for her readers, who she chattily refers to as "you".

The women's game is transformed. England have shot up to fifth in the world and a London medal is realistic.

More than 200,000 people around the world came together today to break some wacky and wonderful records on the fifth annual Guinness World Records Day, which commemorates the day in 2004 when Guinness World Records became the world's bestselling copyright book.

Cyclo-therapy

Tim Smit at Heligan in Cornwall showed how effective the "lost garden" tag could be when you want to draw in the punters. John Harris at Dewstow House near Chepstow, Gwent, has an even more extraordinary story to tell about the man who lived in his house in Victorian times and the garden he made there. What on earth was in Henry Oakley's mind when in the 1890s he commissioned the well-known firm of James Pulham and Son to burrow under the croquet lawn of his modest villa, with its long views over the Severn estuary? For his client, Pulham created an underground world of caverns and passages, grottoes and waterfalls, pools, stalactites and boulders, all spookily lit by concealed shafts of light coming through grilles let into the lawn above. Why did this unusual place so quickly and completely disappear from people's memories? And how did John Harris, the down-to-earth, practical farmer who now lives at Dewstow, get drawn into this weird fantasy world of Oakley's?

Five days of the white stuff brought as many cheers as jeers. 'The Independent' heard ordinary people's tales of an extraordinary week

Secondary School Tables 2009

Author and design critic Stephen Bayley has lived in his London house for 25 years but it still isn't finished – and he wouldn't have it any other way

Our summer of discontent

Recognising a catwalk model is not always easy – and it becomes especially difficult when she's swathed in worker gear and wearing outsize gloves while engaged in a spot of tree-planting. At Lant Street, in Southwark, south-east London this sunny Saturday morning, the whole estate has turned out for a midwinter tree-planting session. In these surroundings, the sight of a skinny blonde girl helping a local estate kid could easily go unnoticed.