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My friend Sharkey lives in Brick Lane, where London's East End used to be. He lives in a brick house with his brick of a wife and their baby briquette. I think their Swedish nanny is called Brick, although I may have misheard that. Anyway, she's as thick as a brick and spends her life either checking for text messages or sending them.

Her cold blue eyes never stray from her cold blue screen, even when she absent-mindedly offers Sharkey Junior a BlackBerry to suck. She is a text-maniac. So are most people in Brick Lane. Sharkey andI go in search of a suitable pub, and almost everyone we pass is engrossed in the business of reading and writing text messages.

Text to sue

My friend Sharkey is a lawyer, and he tells me there is a huge increase in text-related litigation. This year, at least 68,000 people in the UK will suffer injuries while they text, and local authorities are getting more and more nervous about responsibility when these injuries happen on their patch. Sharkey shows me a lamp-post where an engrossed text addict fractured a cheekbone, and another where a hapless goon bust their kneecap. Now he shows me a row of lamp-posts the council clad in cushions, like those giant spongy jackets wrapped around rugby posts. He says they are for text-maniacs to bounce off when they walk into them. If the scheme is a success, other councils will follow suit.

Sharkey thinks this is stupid. What next? Electronic beepers

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in dog food, to warn text-maniacs where the dog pooh is? I cannot agree. I think text-mania is great. Let me tell you why.

While everyone else is permanently texting, I can live out my all-time favourite fantasy, which is that I am the Invisible Man. I can stick my tongue out at text-maniacs and waggle it with impunity, because I know they will ignore me. I can give them the finger knowing that they won't take any notice, because they are too engrossed in their digital intercourse to bother with the Invisible Man. I can sneak up and smack them round the head with a pig's bladder, and they won't even know it's me. They'll just think they've walked into another padded lamp-post. Better still, new technology not only gives me the freedom of invisibility, it also allows me to harness my favourite facial expression: the wink.

Wink wink

Thanks to Japanese technology, a nod is no longer as good as a wink to a blind horse. The Kome-Kami device roughly translates as 'eyebrow switch', and it has been developed to act as the ultimate remote control device for mobile phones, iPods and any other electronic device known to man, woman or text-maniac. The system uses a single-chip computer and a pair of infrared sensors small enough to fit into a baseball cap, a pair of specs or even an eyebrow piercing. It can tell a natural blink from a deliberate wink with 100 per cent accuracy. Closing both eyes gives the command to Start as well as Stop. A right-wink means Next and a left-wink means Back, with other combinations giving more complex instructions.

This is brilliant. I have already demonstrated how I can become invisible, and now I can also control objects just by looking at them. What's more, I have the ability to fly to any destination in the galaxy at the touch of a button. Of course I can, thanks to the new Sky button on Google Earth. All these text-maniacs don't realise who they have in their midst, I confess to Sharkey half-way through our third pint of London Pride. I'm a three-star superhero, I am.