Andy Richardson: I'm going on a super-duper power trip

Like when you walk into a bar and the prettiest blonde gives you a look dripping in mystery and intrigue. And you have to decide whether she's inviting you up to her room or whether you've got a blob of Tommy K on your collar from the chips and tomato sauce you ate earlier. Hell awaits if you make the wrong choice.

Or like when the gas repair man sucks air over his teeth, tells you he needs to buy a really, really, really rare valve that's only manufactured by his Uncle Brett, who happens to live in Kazakhstan, and whose bill for repairs, curiously, comes to precisely £1 less than it would cost you to replace your dodgy combi. Thanks boiler man. Keep the change. Actually, keep the house. You'll have pretty much earned it by the time you're done.

It's at times like those that the only reasonable thing to do is to make like Batman and channel your inner superpower. Lord knows we all have them. It's one of the privileges of being a bloke. While women ooze inscrutability and closed-book-subtlety, us blokes get on with doing really extraordinary stuff like making a cheese and pickle sandwich while watching Sky Sports – AT THE SAME TIME. Multi-tasking, thy name is Man.

There's a scene in True Romance, the brilliantly black Quentin Tarantino comedy, in which the lead character, Clarence Worley, is all washed up. Life's taken a dead-end-street-turn and his luck has run dry. He's standing at a sink, cupping handfuls of cold water on his face, wondering what to do next. And then, as if by magic – except none of us are stupid enough to believe in magic now that Paul Daniels has died – the voice of Elvis becomes audible. The King is Clarence's guiding light.

Elvis appears at his shoulder, a vision in gold lame. He tells him how to right a wrong before offering this parting shot: "Clarence, I like you, I always have, always will." Our hero makes up his mind to avenge those who have done him – and his beautiful girlfriend, the absurdly pretty Patricia Arquette – wrong. Elvis is, effectively, Clarence's superpower, his ID, his super-ego, his psychic apparatus. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Sigmund Freud. Actually, don't. We all know you preferred the smooth intoxicating pleasures of a good cigar to a small bowlful of Golden Virginia.

There are 17 superpowers and they are these: invisibility, healing, superhuman strength, water breathing, time travel, omnilingualism, atomokinesis, wall crawling, precognition, echolocation, talking to animals, mind control, intangibility and, of course, immortality. I know, that's only 14. Maths isn't one of my superpowers.

At this point in this week's not-yet-award-winning-but-soon-the-guys-at-the-Midlands-Media-Awards-will-realise-how-good-it-is-and-give-me-a-gong column, you will have asked two questions. They are these.

What in Peter-Pan-and-Wendy's-name are omnilingualism and atomokinesis? Bear with me, reader: they are the ability to understand every language in the world and the ability to control the weather. The second question is this: why haven't you included night vision, flying and telepathy?

The answers are quite simple. All are attainable with relative ease. Night vision is the simplest: just eat more carrots or buy a set of funny SAS goggles. My mate, Rabbit, has a pair and spends all night reading Nigella Lawson recipes in an underground, lead-lined box. X-Ray vision is passé too, the guy who operates the check-in desk at Manchester Airport does that from 9am to 5pm each day and he's just been signed off with stress. Poor fella. The sights he's seen. . .

Flying does't count, either. If sparrows can do it fuelled only by peanut husks and water from puddles, it can't hold a torch to omnilingualism and atomokinesisthinigiewingiewoo.

And telepathy doesn't count either. Every woman I've ever met has known exactly what's on my mind – and none of them have thought it's been particularly interesting or special. So into Room 101 it goes.

Oh yes, and while we're at it – and even though we're long past Easter – coming back from the dead doesn't count either. Jesus and Ian Brown, from The Stone Roses, have both done that. Pah. Call that a superpower? I don't think so, beardy men.

I kinda like the idea that superpowers are out of reach. For without them, Superman would never have got to popularise his blue, red and yellow suit and fancy dress shops across the Black Country would have gone out of business. Oh, and that guy who can make spider's webs by pointing his wrist at tall buildings would have been on the scrapheap, too.

I have only one superpower and it was discovered at school. My teacher told me I could look forward to a life of constant super vision. Boom boom.