I do not do resolutions; not simply because I see the new year as a peculiarly prescribed time to suddenly attempt to behave well but because I thoroughly enjoy the nasty habits I have. It's taken me years to become really proficient in behaving exactly as I please and I'm no more likely to abruptly decide on January 1st that I've got it all wrong and would actually like to be sober, gregarious and willingly eat lettuce any more than I am to suddenly take an interest in a lovely part work on the mysterious healing power of crystals, first issue (complete with beautiful rose quartz sphere) only £2.99. It is unfortunate therefore that I appear to have chosen the national month of blanket nicotine patch adverts and excessive salad consumption to have a radical shift in thought; I refer, of course, to the decision concerning the super power it's most advantageous to have.

When I was five and six, it was flying. Like a lot of children, I was sinisterly influenced by Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton; unlike many of those other children, perhaps, I was convinced it was actually possible if only I could perfect the right sequence of moves at the right speed. Figuring simplicity was at the heart of success, this plan essentially involved running as quickly as possible down the length of the garden, garden cane whipped from my father's runner beans in hand, and pole vaulting myself into the air when maximum velocity was reached. I probably don't need to tell you that I found myself face first into the fence more often than soaring high above the neighbour's rooftops and the repeated attempts were eventually banned after a fractured arm and gusts of poorly stifled laughter from a series of increasingly amused A&E doctors.

After this dispiriting experience most of my desire for improbable capabilities with which to astound family and friends and peer into strange bathroom windows was quashed for a time. I read somewhere that Sylvia Plath used to compose villanelles to relieve the tedium of dull science lessons; I, aged eleven, preferred the less taxing and considerably less classy mental exercise of dreaming up the perfect super power. To this day I am not quite sure how pulleys work and what it was about white pea flowers and red pea flowers genes that was so important, but after many years of intense deliberation I did come to a conclusion of sorts, and that conclusion was invisibility. Flying, I had decided, was a much too specialised and ultimately redundant skill that wouldn't enable me to live in a fashion that my ever growing and disturbingly gleeful megalomania demanded; what I needed was the ability to get rich and powerful by undetectable and probably underhand means. I had a problem, however. Modern depictions of invisible people always show them in clothes or tightly wrapped bandages to give themselves a physical presence, but what use is invisibility if you are unable to render the things that you touch invisible too? I could certainly rob a bank in the nude, but it was no use if all the police had to do to catch me was to follow the bags marked SWAG bobbing by themselves down the road. Without that, all you can really use invisibility for is to sneak into cinemas without paying and pinch bottoms. Eventually the metaphysical difficulties proved too much and this idea was abandoned in my late teens for a skill ultimately more powerful and beautiful in its simplicity; the touch of sterility.

Stuck on the train next to fifteen year old Charmina who's having a twenty minute mobile conversation consisting only of the word 'cha!' and teeth sucking at the loudest possible volume? Kapow! One decisive brush of the shoulder as you go past to get off and ensure that magnificent vocabulary and astounding self importance dies with her. Been called a lesbian for the third time in the week because you wont flirt with a man who's accosted you in the street? Kablam! Instantly and invisibly render him much less of a man than he obviously thinks he is. Trouble is, though, that this is an essentially philanthropic skill. There are no immediate benefits for me; the comfort of knowing I have prevented future generations suffering at the coarse hands of idiot descendents isn't quite enough. Thus it was that this power quickly mutated into one with instantaneous appeal; the touch of silence.

I live in the wrong city for someone who finds being forced to listen to other people's talking incredibly stressful; I belong to the wrong species. The ability to hear or silence the noise of other people's prattle at will is my very definition of bliss and for a while, my imagination ran away with this idea. I saw no reason why, once this power had been perfected, it needed to be activated by touch alone. I am the all-powerful bringer of silence, after all, and if I wished to have instant quiet in handy aerosol form then I would! One quick squirt as you get on the public transport and your morning commute becomes immediately more bearable, and the computer virus version that specifically targets certain blogs would not be far behind. Unfortunately if there's one thing more annoying than being on a crowded bus full of babbling fools unaware of their own banality then it must be being on a crowded bus full of panicked people running up and down clutching at their throats because their vocal chords have suddenly seized up. Practicality demands that it is I who is rendered temporarily deaf, even if it denies me the unmeasurable glee that smiting the chattering masses with my righteous vengeance with undoubtedly afford.

In the annoying absence of this power I do have my mp3 player, a version of which I have had since I was twelve (the first a pink Walkman bought with my birthday money, mix tapes courtesy of the chart countdown every afternoon on Capital radio) and without which I will not leave the house. The music on it is irrelevant next to it's chatter-cancelling ability, and should the power indicator ever insolently show red I hoard the very last remaining wisps of battery life nervously in case I should have to stand anywhere within half a mile of a baby before I can get it to the nearest recharger. I miss all manner of things by being constantly plugged in to this white noise tranquilliser of course; the happy sound of birdsong, the increasingly insistent warning of approaching car horns and the occasional fascinating snippet of other people's lives that would give me the plots for a series of touching and incredibly well written books, all in mould-breaking genres of literary fiction that would earn me wealth, notoriety and multiple invitations from Rob Newman to come round for some kissing at my earliest convenience. But as the gods have not seen fit to endow me with what I so clearly deserve I am sure, as I think the others that share my morning commuting route would be, that this is a very small price to pay for one day snapping and leaving a trail of bloody but silent devastation from my front door to my place of work one cold winter's day.