Rosemary McLeod: The friends in deed when we're in need

This year 25 people were acknowledged, including a group who worked together - a police officer, firefighter, and two doctors - to save Brian Coker's life in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.

It's hard to get excited about the usual honours lists.

It seems you qualify by a) getting very rich in business, b) living a long while, c) doing your duty, or c) living on a remote bit of the map that hasn't featured in a while.

Maybe they throw the recommendations up in the air, and give gongs to the names they catch on the way down.

Maybe they go by star signs. Whatever they do, the results mostly look as dreary as prize day at a finishing school for the frightfully well behaved.

You need predictable, solid people to make the world go round, but it's the outstanding in other ways that make for pleasure at the breakfast table when you read about the other awards, the ones given to the brave, impulsive, selfless people who also make the world go round, only possibly a little bit faster.

This week, the New Zealand Bravery Awards make you proud of the best in human nature in a world that can be mean and desperate.

I'm a sucker for heroes, man, beast or bird.

Lately I shed tears for pigeons while watching The Antiques Road Show, the programme I call Thumb Suck because it's so soothing.

These weren't the ordinary, messy pigeons that poo in the street, but British homing pigeons seconded to the military during both world wars.

They helped save many lives, and 32 of the birds, with names such as White Vision, Tyke, and Kenley Lass, were awarded the animal VC. A proud pigeon club bloke took their records to the show to share their amazing story.

I get a lump in my throat over police dogs hurt in the line of duty, pets that alert the owner when a home catches fire, and last week for the horses (and riders) attacked by a vicious dog on the Kapiti Coast.

So you can imagine how I react to the human bravery awards.

This year, 25 people were acknowledged, including a group who worked together - a police officer, firefighter, and two doctors - to save Brian Coker's life in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.

With aftershocks still shaking the now notorious PGC building, they had to amputate both his legs, by torchlight, with a pocket knife and hacksaw. He proved himself equally a hero the next year, competing in the New York Marathon on a hand cycle.

Coker says: "Life is still a struggle, but it's like anything that happens to people - you've got to learn to live with it, and that's what we do."

As you do - or hope you'll do, if a calamity strikes. But you always wonder.

There were firefighters who tunnelled through the debris of the same building, through impossibly narrow spaces, to free three students, one of whom had a limb amputated before he was freed.

There were the first police at the scene, who helped rescue people while a fire burned in the lower levels. And so on. Whatever the later criticism of rescue co-ordination, they showed how we depend on police, medical workers and firefighters to go well beyond mere duty in a crisis.

It's baffling that ambulance workers can find themselves in physical danger from drunken idiots, or victims of thieves who steal their equipment.

It's disappointing, too, to hear complaints about police while they're steadily doing the work nobody else would volunteer for. Let's face it, they're the garbage collectors who clean up after human behaviour that should make us ashamed of what we're capable of.

And yet - as with last week's rescue of the injured caver, trapped in a rockfall 6km inside Germany's deepest cave - we can achieve marvels.

It took the teamwork of 758 people to bring him out, an affirmation of values that make you pleased to belong in this weird world after all.