Plaid Cymru MP Hywel Williams said the benefits squeeze set out in the Autumn Statement threatened to dismantle the welfare state and create a generation lost to unemployment, homelessness and poverty.

BBC: Autumn Statement: Benefit squeeze as economy slows

Well, we know that growth has been much slower than expected and - crucially, for the government - the OBR decided, in the last Autumn Statement, that we were not going to get back a lot of the output we had lost.

BBC: Hard times for Mr Osborne

Imagine us as Australians, though, and the hyperborean blast must mean a heatwave scorching over from Java's scented isle, just as (though neither actually happens) Father Christmas should arrive half-clad on waterskis, and Easter should recall, to anthropologists, not the Adonis festival and the rebirth of spring but some autumn feast that has lost its way, or why not?

ECONOMIST: Johnson

In the autumn of 1954, not long after Pamela Schmidt's surgery, he lost six out of seven cross-circulation patients, including a 7-month-old baby.

FORBES: Brave heart

In the autumn term of 2008, 0.73% of half-days were lost to authorised and unauthorised school holidays and 0.45% were lost in the spring term of 2009.

BBC: Millions of school days lost to family holidays

The Pumas are a shadow of the side that finished third in the 2007 World Cup, where they ended Scotland's hopes, and they had lost both their previous Tests this autumn, against England and Wales.

BBC: Scotland 6-9 Argentina