A third Spider-Man is on its webby way, and hurrah to that. Iron Man, and a second Hulk, are coming to join the latest Batman on our screens. One of the big film events of the summer will be the The Fantastic Four, the latest adaptation of a superhero comic.

One of the four, the trailer hints, has the ability to make his arms go all long and squishy and squirm their way into hidden places, like Stringfellow: one looks like Prescott with galloping acne, and picks up buses with his teeth. The other two I'm less clear about. The third bloke seems to have suffered a rare mutation: one of those odd midlife things, perhaps, involving over-exposure to the sound of Jeanette Winterson, which suddenly turns a right-thinking liberal into a sexist pig. The fourth, the woman, has marvellous jugs and is probably very good at ironing.

All delightful entertainment, of course, but I'm not sure why we would seem to need, these days, quite so many superheroes. Role models? Surely not, when we have such winningly likable modern public figures as Hazel Blears and Piers Morgan to look up to. Survival tips? Hardly necessary, these days, when we have learnt so much from the recent filmic works of Messrs Willis and Seagal about how to get yourself out of any life-threatening situation without recourse to webs or zits. (If on the roof of a burning building, jump. Something will come up. Don't worry which wire to cut; it will always be the right one. Psychopathic Olympic-class marksmen will instantly lose the ability to shoot straight as soon as they have to dress in black, tote ill-defined Teutonic accents or mass in a group, suddenly exhibiting instead one's granny's inability to hit a barn door with a banana. Any security system can be bypassed if you possess a cotton bud and a vest.)

So all good and whizzy, our new celluloid superheroes, but I'm not sure their outre talents, the arm-spindling and invisibility and the rest, are exactly what we need, now, this weekend, in Britain. Were I a superhero, possessed of the relevant modern skills, then here, in all honesty, is what I'd like to be able to achieve, tomorrow.

Find a restaurant table, placed in the sunshine but tolerably far from dogshit, for me and my best girl, and be allowed to order within 28 minutes, and pay by cheque because it's getting on in the month, and have them get only two bits of the order wrong, and smoke. Insert a scart lead into the back of an electrical appliance without it instantly breaking and reducing me to fuddled tears over whether I'm an idiot or whether it's simply the worst-designed piece of chicanery since tetrapaks, or indeed the chicane.

Understand any aspect of the so-called news agenda: understand, in particular, whether there lies anywhere within it an honest attempt to reflect what people actually want to know, or whether they're all just burning chicken-claws and having a giggle. Speak by telephone to a human in what was, once, my bank. Find again, for only the second time despite years of looking, that damned elusive little winebar off Bloomsbury where publishing girls take their long legs in the sunshine. Oh - yes - write a bestseller. Achieve the mature emotional peace which would let me stop making cheap references to other girls' legs. Take a tube without becoming a puddle. Say no to the third whisky.

I'm not sure what I could call myself. Mitty-Boy? But if Spidey and the boys can change their worlds, at least I can make a start on mine. Bank's going to be a problem.