Planning a visit to the UK? Here we help with ways to cut your costs.

AVOID BIG EVENTS. Big sporting events, concerts and exhibitions can increase the cost of accommodation and make it harder to find a room. A standard double room at the Thistle Brighton on the final Friday of the Brighton Comedy Festival (19 Oct.) costs ￡169.15 at Booking.com. A week later, the same room costs￡118.15.

If you can be flexible(灵活的)and want to know dates to avoid or you’re looking for a big event to pass your time – check out sites such as Whatsonwhen.com, which allow you to search for events in the UK by city, date and category.

STAY AWAY FROM THE STATION. If traveling to your destination by train, you may want to find a good base close to the station, but you could pay more for convenience at the start of your holiday.

Don’t be too picky about the part of town you stay in. Booking two months in advance, the cheapest room at Travelodge’s Central Euston hotel in London for Saturday 22 September was ￡95.95. A room just a subway journey away at its Covent Garden hotel was￡75.75. And at Farringdon, a double room cost just￡62.95.

LOOK AFTER YOURSELF REALLY. Central hotels in cities such as London, Edinburgh and Cardiff can cost a fortune, especially at weekends and during big events. As an alternative, consider checking into a self-catering flat with its own kitchen. Often these flats are hidden away on the floors of city center buildings. A great example is the historic O’ Neill Flat on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, available for￡420 for five days in late September, with room for four adults.

GET ON A BIKE. London’s “Boris bikes” have attracted the most attention, but other cities also have similar programs that let you rent a bicycle and explore at your own pace, saving you on public transport or car parking costs.

Among the smaller cities with their own programs are Newcastle (casual members pay around ￡1.50 for two hours) and Cardiff (free up to 30 minutes, or￡5 per day).

About five weeks ago, I noticed the skin of our pet lizard (蜥蜴) was growing dusty. It worried me. I reported the strange surface on the skin of the lizard to my husband and children the next morning. Seconds later, our lizard emerged from its tank with its old skin flowing behind it.

I didn't think about it much until a morning last week when I knocked my favorite teapot off the table. It burst into hundreds of pieces. As I swept up the mess, I wondered why we had been breaking so many things over the months.

The destruction started three months ago. It was my husband's birthday. He had just lost his job. The uncertainty was starting to wear on us, so I wanted to do something special.

"Let's make a cake for Dad!" I cried.

My kids screamed with joy. We baked, iced and sprinkled for most of the day. Candles on the cake! Balloons on the walls! Flowers on the table!

Two hours before my husband came back home from another job interview, my daughter climbed up to grab a glass vase from a high shelf. It fell and crashed beside the cake. Tiny pieces of glass were everywhere. She sobbed loudly as I threw the cake away. My husband had banana pudding for his birthday.

Three days ago, the light in our living room suddenly went out. After several frustrating hours of unsuccessful attempts to fix it, my husband suggested watching the Michael Jordan documentary (纪录片) series The Last Dance.

The poignancy (酸楚) of Jordan retiring from his beloved basketball to play baseball and what had pushed him to make such a tough decision took me by surprise. As I watched him take off his basketball uniform and replace it with a baseball uniform, I saw him leaving behind the layer that no longer served him, just as our lizard had. Neither of them chose the moment that had transformed them. But they had to live with who they were after everything was different. Just like us. I realized that we have to learn to leave the past behind.

Humans do not shed skin (脱皮) as easily as other animals. The beginning of change is upsetting. The process is tiring. Damage changes us before we are ready. I see our lizard, raw and nearly new.

Jordan said that no matter how it ends, it starts with hope. With our tender, hopeful skin, that is where we begin.

A trial project by the Montreal Children's Hospital suggested that the use of medical hypnosis (催眠) can reduce pain and anxiety in patients. The project also resulted in a reduction in the amount of medicines used to perform medical-imaging (医学影像) procedures.

“During the examination children don't move. It works perfectly. It's amazing,” said Johanne L’Ecuyer, a medical-imaging technologist at the hospital.

The project was inspired by a French team from Rouen University Hospital Centre where examinations are done under hypnosis instead of general anesthesia (麻醉).

A French medical-imaging technologist --- also a hypnotist --- was invited to train a few members in the medical-imaging department of the children's hospital. In all, 80 examinations were conducted for the project between January and September, 2019, focusing on the imaging procedures that would cause anxiety.

Hypnosis is not a state of sleep: It is rather a modified (改变的) state of consciousness. The technologist will guide the patient to this modified state --- an imaginary world that will disassociate itself more and more from the procedure that follows.

“The technologist must build up a story with the patient,”   Ms. L’Ecuyer said. “The patient is left with the power to choose what he wants to talk about. Do you play sports? Do you like going to the beach? We establish a subject that we will discuss throughout the procedure.”

Everything that happens next during the procedure must be related to this story --- an injection (注射) becomes the bite of an insect; the heat on the skin becomes the sensation of the sun and a machine that rings becomes a police car passing nearby.

“The important thing is that the technologist associates what is happening outside the patient's body with what the patient sees in his head," Ms. L’Ecuyer said. "It requires creativity on the part of the technologist, imagination, a lot of patience and kindness.”

The procedure attracted the staff(工作人员) a lot when it was introduced in January. “It spread like wildfire that someone from France was here to train the technologists,” Ms. L’Ecuyer said. She added that she had a line of staff at her door wanting to take the training.

Some of the greatest problems we face today are the destruction (破坏) of our environment. Brown clouds, polluted water, endangered wild animals.., these problems seem so huge.

So my family does what we can. We take cloth bags to stores instead of using plastic bags. We walk where we don't have to drive...

But does it do any good? When I am the only one in line at the market with cloth bags, am I doing any good? Does my walking to stores make any real difference to the world?

I recently learned something about flamingos (火烈鸟) which like to get together in groups of a thousand or more. Every year, when the time comes for migration (迁徙), a few of them first take off from the lake. But none of the others seem to notice, so the small group returns. However, the next day they try again. This time few more fly along with them, but most of them still pay no attention, so they return again. They try for several times. Every time a few more birds join in but, since the thousands of others still take no notice, the great migration plan is once more stopped.

Then one day something changes. The same small group of birds once again starts flying and a small number more join in just as before, then more. Finally, they all take flight and the migration really begins.

What a spectacular sight it must be—thousands of flamingos taking off into the sky at once!

A few can make a difference. Even if you're the one to take the first step, and continue trying, others will someday take notice and together we will solve even our greatest problems.