It happened again this morning.

I love peanut butter on toast, the richer the better.

Nice and thick and the corgis have to beg their best before they get any peanut buttery toast scraps.

I’d always suspected that the reason I liked it so much is that it was not very good for you, and as we all know, God’s special sense of humour made everything bad taste good and vice versa.

It turns out this is now wrong.

Peanut butter isn’t on the naughty list any more.

It’s been a big week in challenging deeply held “truths”.

And I am not talking about Donald Trump other than noting how many people now are saying they knew all along he’d win and that the two people who have already said they’re thinking about standing in 2020 are Kanye West and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

No, the big challenge this week was the so-called Supermoon.

Super? Yeah sure?

It may have been 30 per cent brighter, 14 per cent bigger, but it still couldn’t leap tall gum trees in a single bound in my backyard. The bits I glimpsed were bright.

But in the Bushwhacked circle of acquaintances, there was a fairly common belief that it was going to be a tough week for police, emergency workers, hospitals and aged care facilities.

Lots of journos share the belief that bad and weird stuff happens during full moons.

I recall discussing this with a cop in Buronga just across the Murray River from Mildura when I was a 16-year-old cadet reporter.

(At the time, we were both stamping around in chest high roadside grass at midnight, trying to find the body of a child thrown from a car which had run under the back of a semi-trailer.

I cannot tell you the horror of standing on a discarded squelchy inner tube in the dark!)

Science keeps insisting there is no evidence of a link between the phase of the moon and human behaviour, but we all obstinately stick to it.

There’s a detailed article on the ABC science website in which Australia’s answer to errr, everything, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki goes to great lengths to show the almost absolute lack of scientific evidence, despite thousands of studies all round the world.

Guess what? The comments section at the end of Dr Karl’s article was loaded with personal observations that there WAS a link.

They came from police and emergency workers, health workers and others who work with the public.

The theory now is that because this belief is so deeply ingrained in our belief structures, whenever there’s a full moon we take particular note of people acting a bit troppo.

We might observe an idiotic bit of dangerous driving and then note the full moon and AHA, the light bulb goes on.

The belief feeds the need to find evidence, so we do.

And further, it taps into our very ancient fear of the dark, which was reflected again this week in the VicHealth research, which show that 45 per cent of Bendigo people are in fear of walking on our streets after dark – even though this is a very safe community, and you probably have more to fear from tripping over the cat than being molested by a stranger.

Maybe we need more Supermoons?

WAYNE GREGSON