When you're trying to mend something, whether it be a washing machine, jumbo jet, sick pet or a sad head, the worst problem to try and solve is the intermittent fault.

Each malfunction has a relevance to us, a different scale of importance and brings different emotions to the fore. The washing machine that fails to let you in occasionally, or pumps its dirty water out all over the floor is not life-threatening. Certainly annoying. Getting on a Jumbo jet when it has an intermittent undiagnosed fault is definitely life threatening, and Boeing's new planes are quite rightly still grounded – they know what the fault is, but can't fix it to the satisfaction of the authorities.

However, mechanics have huge resources, testing equipment and the advantage that their intermittent fault isn't likely to cause harm, and it doesn't move around providing the appliance that's affected is taken out of service.

Working with animals when they get ill is heartbreaking, watching your own animals suffer, using whatever experience you've gained to decide at what point to involve the vet, and knowing that whatever skills are brought to bear, you lack that vital tool, the ability to talk and ask what hurts.

Sad heads, caused by who knows what combination of nature and nurture, possibly genetically predisposed, or caused by issues during childhood, lifestyle choices, illness, poor partner selection, being sent out to fight on behalf of your country or losing your home and running for your life from bombs and bullets, all of which leave a mark, intermittent faults that sometimes can be coped with, sometimes not.

The difference with us humans lies in our ability to communicate, which not all of us can do as well as we'd like, either spoken or written. Sadly excellent sites like Moodscope are by their very nature exclusive, as the ability to easily read, grasp and utilise sometimes interesting and complex blogs is only available to us lucky ones with a half-decent education, no dyslexia and a computer.

Get to the point, I hear you cry – where many of us on Moodscope are helped and supported by the blogs and responses in our quest to diagnose and cure our intermittent faults, we must also be cautious not to rely totally on Moodscope's reassuring presence. We must also continue the search for the engineer and tools that can help us to understand what it is that ails us, and how to fix it – who or what is your favourite or most effective tool to fix a hole in your head where the rain is getting in?

Mortimer

A Moodscope member.