In amongst all the wars, executions, natural disasters and serial killers there’s been a couple of moments recently that have restored my faith in mankind.

The first was seeing Richard Hammond talking to Jonathan Ross just before Christmas. That’s a story that was surely meant to end a lot worse than it did, and there’s something about it that’s definitely verging on miraculous. It’s not even like I’m a huge car enthusiast, but that was one of the moments that made Christmas feel all Christmassy this year.

The second was Hazel getting her wallet back yesterday. She lost it on Saturday night. Due to an evidently rather impressive intake of alcohol she was entirely unable to remember quite where she lost it. Needless to say it was somewhere between leaving the house and staggering back in again at silly o’clock (i can’t actually verify this as I was completely hammered with Wes in Ealing at the time). On Sunday morning, out of the blue, the doorbell rang and her wallet was returned by a girl who had found it lying in the street on Saturday night. The wallet still contained its unspent cash, and the girl wouldn’t even accept Hazel’s profuse offering of a fiver to say thanks.

A completely unprompted act of human kindness from one stranger to another, with no more motivation that a desire to make the world a slightly better place by doing the right thing.

Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

I love finding out that something I have always assumed has no name actually does have a name. I think it satisfies the linguist in me.

I’ve often suffered from myoclonic jerks. I had one just last night. It’s ‘that thing’ that happens when you fall asleep, and immediately snap back out of it. Like you’ve fallen over. Or been hit in the head. For some reason whenever it happens to me I think I’ve been shot in the head. It’s always so vivid.

According to the episode of ‘House’ that I’ve just watched (and backed up with some speedy Googling) it turns out that a myoclonic jerk occurs when for some reason your body mistakes falling asleep for dying, and sends you an electrical pulse to your muscles to give you a jump start. Weird hey?

The same thing is apparently the cause of night terrors, something else that I have sporadically. That instance of waking up petrified of something with no idea why. It’s the same cause. Again, it’s always so vivid and always the same. I always feel like there’s a spider hanging directly over my face whenever that happens. Sometimes I’m sure I even hallucinate them.

I’ve always thought it was a bit weird. Something idiosyncratic that no one else ever suffered from. Now that I know it has a name it suddenly seems so normal.

On top of that I think it makes a topnotch highbrow insult. It implies jerking people you think are dead. So that’s basically the same as calling someone a necrophiliac. It also implies they’re intrinsically misinformed. It even sounds insulting, you get the satisfaction of knowing they didn’t understand quite how you insulted them, but they still know you called them a jerk. Or at least they think they know. It’s a win win kind of insult.

The next time someone calls you a Waspish Pigeon, be sure to respond by calling them a Myoclonic Jerk.