【推荐3】Mei Ling hurried to Uncle Ahmad’s house that evening. She could not wait to try the delicious nasi lemak (椰浆饭) and curry (咖哩) chicken that he had specially prepared for the occasion. He was celebrating his sixtieth birthday and everyone in the village was invited for this biggest party of the year.

That party was special as Uncle Ahmad had promised to give everyone a surprise. He said he had bought a magic box that could show pictures of people and that the people could talk. No one in the village had ever heard of anything like that.

Even as Mei Ling was walking towards Uncle Ahmad’s house, the smell of nasi lemak and curry chicken filled the air. The children knew that they would be having a great feast that night. When all the guests arrived, Uncle Ahmad presented his magic box. It sat on a four-spindly-leg table at the front of his big room. On the front of the black box was a glass screen and four little buttons.

Everyone pushed forward to get a closer look at it. Mei Ling and her friends peered into the screen but they could not see anything. They tapped the glass to make sure it was not a trick.

“Don’t touch the magic box!” said Uncle Ahmad He stepped in front of it and signaled to them to move back. He did not want anything to happen to it. He told them to sit down on the mats (垫子). Then he pushed one of the buttons and the glass screen lit up.

Suddenly, the face of a man appeared on the screen and he started speaking. What kind of man was his? He was so small! The guests’ eyes lit up. Everyone broke into chatter.

The children looked behind the box but there was no one there. Could someone be inside the box? They wondered. They could not work it out.

Uncle Ahmad waved his hands again and everyone became quiet. People sat eating dinner, staring at the characters on the screen.

It was the very first time that the villagers had watched television.

【推荐1】When I was at school, I hated art. Growing up in north Wales, I was not able to rate higher than an E in my final exams. I wasn’t too upset; I thought I wasn’t going to choose it as a career.

By the time I was about four, I started sleepwalking. At night, I used to go under the stairs and scribble (乱画) on the wall. When I was 15, I was no longer just making scribbles. I was drawing anything from pictures of Marilyn Monroe to unrealistic paintings. I showed some to my art teachers. They said: “Why can’t you do this in class?” It was something I struggled to understand myself. I tried so hard to draw when I was awake, practising and using the same tools. But no matter what I did, I was unable to recreate the drawings.

Once I left school, I became a nurse, mainly helping people with brain injuries. I also met my partner. He is unbelievably supportive of my art and sleepwalking habits—he often films me as I work. And when I begin to paint in my sleep, I’ll use any tools I can find, sometimes knives and forks. That’s the only thing that worries my partner—that I’ll accidentally hurt myself. I have gone to various sleep clinics to try to get to the bottom of what’s happening, but nothing out of the ordinary was found health-wise. Alcohol or lack of sleep does bring the sleepwalking on more, though, so I am careful about that.

I have learned to hug my unusual talent and set up my first art exhibition in 2007 at my local in library to raise money for cancer research. Within a week, I had 160 calls from different media outlets and organizations wanting to hear about my art. I was over the moon. I then decided to leave my very fulfilling job in nursing and become a full-time artist.

【推荐2】A few days ago, my husband, Russ, and I lost our house of 28 years to a California wild fire.

On that night, we had to leave our house and sleep in the back seat of our Ford. The next morning, we had to drive three and a half hours to find a hotel that had an available room. Only later, in the local newspaper, did we see photographs of the destruction. Our house had been consumed by the fire along with most of our neighborhood.

How are we going to rebuild after this? I thought, rounding a corner in the sidewalk on my walk back to the hotel. Is it even possible?

I noticed something up ahead—a pair of nickels, shining like precious jewels. They were just nickels, but they somehow felt special. I bent down and picked them up. If these were lucky coins, I could use all the luck I could get.

A few days later, I made a trip to the store to buy essentials. The enormous task of replacing everything we’d lost put a heavy weight on me. I was about to leave when I felt the urge to stop and turn my head to the right. I could hardly believe it—there on nickela shelf, was a nickel! Okay, maybe this is more than luck, I thought and put the nickel in my pocket.

I told myself that I had found the nickels just by chance. Then I found one next to my plate at a restaurant—on Thanksgiving, no less, when I was missing our house more than ever. It seemed that a nickel appeared whenever my spirits plummeted.

Whenever I reached my breaking point, I’d find another nickel. In the grass at the park, or near the tire of my car in a parking lot. Once, my change for a quick lunch was given entirely in nickels. “I’m sorry,” the cashier said. “It’s all we have.”

It’s all I needed!

One day, I was sitting at the desk when my phone rang. It was a real-estate agent I’d been working with.

“I have a new listing,” she said.

“When can we see it?”

A few hours later, Russ and I were following the agent down the driveway toward the house.

I didn’t think long. Because there, in the driveway, …

【推荐3】When I was a teenager, I knew nothing about mental health and I didn’t care about mental health. Why would I? Like my dad always used to say, “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it!”

But, unfortunately my mental health did “break”. Aged 17 I developed anorexia(神经厌食症). I didn’t realise at the time. When I was 23, I was found severely clinically anorexic. I had fast-tracked treatment at The Maudsley Hospital and went through 2.5 years of treatment. People are always interested to know what helped me recover. Actually, it was simple: comedy.

I’m a professional talk show actor. Comedy, for me, began as a hobby and has unbelievably progressed into a job. One of the things that initially held my attention about talk show is how it plays with pain. Humour became a way of understanding things, then a way of explaining them. Now it’s become a way of helping other people.

The combination of being told to speak out about mental health and writing comedies to play jokes on myself, actually turned into the best type of treatment I could ever have had. Nothing has ever really helped normalise a thought or feeling quite like a joke that makes people openly say, “Me too!”

That’s why I’ve come up with a six-week comedy course aimed at people with mental health difficulties. It builds lasting friendships, fights against loneliness and normalises conversations around mental health; when audiences are laughing, they have to be listening, and when they’re listening, they can learn. This unique opportunity enables comedy to reach people in a completely different way to all the sob stories, shocking statistics and dry documentaries (纪录片) about mental illness, inspiring with positivity rather than turning to negativity.

Talk show was a must to my recovery. So, I want to pay that forward and show other people that your mental health doesn’t have to be “broke” before you can “fix it”.