THERE are too many super-hero films and they need to stop making them. This is a bold statement, and one which would disappoint the eight-year-old me, who would be eagerly awaiting Superman II while simultaneously watching The Incredible Hulk and wearing the Spider-Man outfit my Auntie Mary made me.

But that is the point. I recently went to see the film Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice. I give it its full title, because if I had to sit through two and a half hours of that bloated nonsense, I am damned if I am not going to make you sit through the six words of that title.

I am aware that, as a man in his increasingly less early forties, I compromised my dignity going to see a film about Superman and Batman beating each other up, especially as I went alone. But I owed it to that eight-year-old version of myself, who would have sold his grandmother to ICI to see a film starring both Superman and Batman.

I sat on the back row, as I usually do, partly because it affords the best view, but mostly because it leaves an odd number of seats free, annoying any couples who might arrive late for the film.

Next to me were two men, one of whom could easily have been a finalist in the Mr Terrible Moviegoer pageant in any of the past 10 years, and his long-suffering friend, who must have been regretting that day in Freshers Week a couple of years ago when he expressed approval of his future cinema companion’s Nakatomi Corporation T-shirt.

Mr Terrible Moviegoer did two things noisily throughout the film. The first was to eat popcorn. One might imagine that it is difficult to eat popcorn noisily. Yes, there is often a bit of rustling, but the actual chewing of popcorn should be about as noisy as the chewing of candy floss. Yet this man managed it.

The second was to narrate the film to his companion as it went along, warning him about bits that were coming up and explaining references to the original comic text that the filmmakers had shoehorned in. Every illogical twist in the plot was telegraphed by Mr Terrible Moviegoer. The effect was to make this film, already an trial, unsurprisingly awful. It was like watching paint explode dry.

But across the aisle was somebody undergoing an even more dreadful ordeal. It was a mother with a group of children, all roughly about the same age as me when I was awaiting my second Superman film, all of whom had faces expressing the same amount of boredom, bewilderment, and fear as I had.

She had to keep hiding their faces or taking them to the toilet to avoid them seeing people being blown up and branded, or trafficked women, or a beaker of urine, or Clark Kent and Lois Lane having sex in a bath.

It was all her own fault, of course. She should have known that a film starring Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman, and which had associated toys and Build-A-Bear outfits and children’s books, would not be suitable IN ANY WAY AT ALL for children.

And that is why super-hero films have to stop. There are so many of them now that the directors have to make them “distinctive” and self-consciously serious and artistic.

They have to start talking about “universal themes” and “mythology”.

That is why we end up with films in which Batman and Superman kill and maim criminals and innocent bystanders, instead of stopping people from killing and maiming criminals and innocent bystanders.

These filmmakers forget that people mostly like super-hero stories because they feature characters in silly bright costumes going about the place doing good and spreading hope.

They should learn a lesson from TV’s Russell T Davies. When he brought back Doctor Who a decade ago he produced something quite extraordinary.

He produced a programme for all age groups, that everybody could watch, that introduced some adult themes in a way that was suitable for children, that could make people laugh or cry, that was faithful to the spirit of old Doctor Who, and which felt new and exciting. And it became the biggest show on British television for years.

If the filmmakers followed his example, they might be able to make a Superman story that not even Mr Terrible Moviegoer 2016 could spoil for me. And one that I would allow my eight-year-old self to see.

I KNEW it was going to be a difficult journey when I slapped my bus pass card on the sensor and the green light did not come on.

The bus driver looked at me as if it were my fault, as if my actual hobby were annoying bus drivers and that day I had chosen him as a target. I might as well have addressed him in French.

I missed those glorious times, when having a pass meant that I was able to waft past the people paying for tickets and snaffle the best seats, like Rihanna or the late Sir David Frost would if they had to catch the 86.

Now we have to queue to place our cards on a sensor and wait until the computer inside the ticket machine stops chatting with his mates over the internet – no doubt plotting the downfall of the human race through the use of automated checkouts – then umms and ahhs, and finally lets us through.

“I’ll try it again,” I said to the bus driver. “I’ve only just renewed it in that newsagent’s down there, it should be fine.”

The bus driver appeared pained by having to listen to so much of my life story but nevertheless acquiesced, and I plonked the card back on the sensor. This time the computer inside had come off its tea break and the green light finally flashed.

The driver waved me through, clearly angered that somehow I had gamed the system, and I went to find a seat.

Of course, all the decent seats were grabbed in this post-convenience world, and I had to take one of the weirdo rear-facing seats.

I have no idea why bus designers decided that they would have little nooks of facing seats over the wheel arch. Maybe they were trying to capture the corporate mini-conference market.

In any case, I sat down, took out my copy of Bus Driver Annoyer Monthly, and noted that I was sitting opposite a young woman with rollers roughly the size of those hay bales you see in farmland down the M6.

It appeared she was taking a long time to compose a selfie, until I realised the phone I thought she was holding was a compact and she was actually doing her make-up.

I started wondering why it was that some women do their make-up on public transport. It’s not that I object in principle – although you would never see me having a shave on the bus – but in practice it must be difficult. And this woman was sitting over the wheel arch. One pothole and she would look like The Joker in The Dark Knight.

I need not have worried, for her phone rang, and she paused her cosmetic activity to answer it. The call was clearly from a young suitor, for her demeanour went from calm to animated very quickly.

She chuckled, then said, loudly, so that everybody on the quiet bus could hear, “If you talk to me again I will stab you,” and she ended the conversation.

I am paraphrasing, of course. In reality, she scattered f-words on the sentence like rice at a wedding. They got in everywhere, even between syllables. It was almost poetic.

The ferocity of her promise made the middle-aged woman sitting next to her edge away. But she resumed making up her face as if nothing had happened.

Her suitor rang again. Calmly, if loudly, she informed him that she would personally cut him in such a way that it would reduce his marital value sharply. Then she carried on with her make-up. The woman sitting next to her edged away further. The rest of the bus passengers were on pins.

Her suitor rang a third time. This time she was no-nonsense. “I’m gonna get my cousins to cut your fingers off and shove them down your f*****g throat,” she trilled.

The passengers suppressed a gasp, the woman next to her was now so far away that only one buttock was on the seat. But, of course, I have no poker face.

“What?” she said to me.

I weighed up the situation. This woman’s first response to adversity was to consider the use of a knife. This woman had cousins. Worst of all, this woman was hard enough to put on make-up on the bus.

I had only one option. “Je ne comprends pas,” I said. And thus I still have the fingers to type this column.

I LOGGED into Facebook, because life is too long, and I wanted to see which of my friends and relatives have poor opinions or a disappointing grasp of grammar and punctuation.

And Facebook did one of those things websites occasionally do when you log in, where they stop you from entering until you deal with some admin.

Usually it is something along the lines of: “Hey, Gary, why not give us your mobile telephone number? It would make your life so much easier if, for example, you forgot your password or… I don’t know JUST GIVE US YOUR NUMBER. COME ON, ALL YOUR OTHER FRIENDS HAVE YOUR NUMBER. THIS IS RIDICULOUS.”

At this point, I have to explain to Facebook or the website in question that while I like it, I don’t actually want to have a relationship with it, and eventually, grudgingly, I am allowed in to see which of my friends and relatives like wine or can’t believe it’s still only Tuesday.

But this time was different, and a little chilling. It was the equivalent of Facebook approaching me as I arrived with a sombre expression on its face and ushering me into a side room. It informed me that somebody had tried to access my account a few hours before from an unusual place and asked if it was me.

It told me that eight hours before this, somebody had tried to enter my account from China.

Now I know little for sure about my life at the moment, but among the few things I do know are that A) I had been asleep eight hours previously; and B) I have never been to China and certainly not eight hours before. I know that because I had to get up in the night to go to the toilet.

Admittedly there is very little damage that a person in China could do with my Facebook account, other than posting some Britain First or Minions pictures. But the implication was that somebody sinister had obtained my password, and the trouble is that, while I do not use the same password everywhere, I do tend to whistle a limited number of tunes.

So I had to change my password on Facebook, and then I had to remember every other website where I have used that password and change it there too.

The advice from internet security experts is that you should have a different password for every website you visit, and that you should change these passwords frequently.

But the reason I use recurring passwords across a number of websites is because I have a terrible memory, and so I have absolutely no idea if I have caught them all. This criminal genius in China could be causing mayhem on the British Risotto Guide forums in my name, and I would have literally no idea, because I had forgotten that once in 2011 I had to sign up to read a funny thing about risotto somebody had mentioned on Twitter.

The other advice from internet security experts is that passwords should be made up of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks – to that person on Facebook I know, punctuation marks are the little symbols on your keyboard that are not letters and numbers. They should not be recognisable words.

So not only are you supposed to be able to remember a different password for every site, but the passwords themselves have to be specifically designed not to be memorable?

How am I supposed to live in that sort of world? I cannot even tell you my own mobile phone number without getting it out of my pocket and looking for my contacts and then accidentally phoning somebody and then cancelling the call and then texting them to apologise.

The obvious answer is to keep your passwords in a safe place. But there is no such thing as a safe place. And if my diabolical foe in Jiangxi province got his hands on all of my passwords he could empty my bank account even faster than Tesco and my direct debits combined.

So I have decided to employ a sophisticated double-bluff. I am going to replace all my passwords with the name of my childhood pet Krypto the dog, or the word “password”. There is no way that anybody would believe that I would use those passwords, especially as I have just told all my readers I would use them. Or maybe it’s a triple-bluff, my devious Chinese nemesis. You will never know.

“HERE we go again,” I thought. “This is typical.”

For a much-loved newspaper columnist such as myself, there is nothing worse than enduring an experience which would make an ideal column were it not for the fact that you had already done it.

In this case, it was a fire evacuation. I had just arrived in work when the fire alarm went off on a non-drill day. Long-time readers of this column, of which there are four, can switch off for a few paragraphs. You have basically already read this bit.

My colleagues and I grabbed our coats – in direct contravention of fire evacuation procedures which, in our defence, had not taken into account snow in March – and headed for the emergency exit corridor.

But, as we arrived, keener fugitives from the licking flames, who had not bothered with their coats because they were young and foolish, were pouring back from the emergency corridor. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“We can’t get out that way. They’ve padlocked the fire door.”

A change swept over me, transforming me from the mild-mannered, disappointed, and disappointing man who normally presents himself to the world into something greater.

“We’ll see about that!” I said, and I strode into the corridor, Medium Coat swirling behind me heroically. The fire door was indeed padlocked, as is correct, but it was connected to a glass tube. I had been here before, with fewer witnesses. I had only to break the seal by smashing the glass tube with the hammer attached nearby, and the door would open.

I pushed it open and led the terrified masses into another corridor, this time pitch-black. “Hug the wall,” I said, “and follow me.” Using the light from the screen on my phone I found my way to the end of the corridor, where the light switch and exit door were situated.

I brought light to the corridor and placed my hands on the door. “This is typical,” I thought. “If I hadn’t done all this before, it would definitely make a column, AND one which would make me look good for a change. Ah, well… I suppose I should continue to save these people’s lives.” And, triumphantly, I flung open the door to the outside world…

And I squashed against the wall the man who was on the other side of that door, and who was sheltering from the snow.

That is where I would normally finish my column, except for one thing. The reason the man was sheltering behind the door was because he was homeless. And that is increasingly typical too.

Over the past few years the number of people sleeping rough on the journey I take from bus stop to office has grown markedly. Actual people living in the year 2016 find themselves forced to live on the streets, on nights when it is cold enough to snow, dependent for food on the charity of passers-by.

The government’s own figures – which are dependent on rough sleepers actually being seen by members of the public and so underestimate the problem – show the numbers across the UK have more than doubled since 2010.

The trouble is solving this homelessness problem costs money, and it appears the government would prefer that we pay for it from the spare coppers in our pocket.

I give what I can, within reason – a quid here or there, some shrapnel spoiling the line of my suit trousers – and it makes me feel virtuous. You might feel the same way. You might even feel heroic.

It is not good enough.

We have become accustomed in this country to think that we can have things of value for nothing. We do not pay for music, we do not pay for news, we complain about the BBC licence fee.

And then we vote for governments which pander to the idea that we can have decent public services for nothing, and complain when it turns out we can’t.

So the only way to get rough sleepers off our streets is through decent social services and decent social housing, and we have to pay for that through taxation, not charity.

It’s how we emptied the streets of rough sleepers after the Thatcher years. It is not glamorous – it does not even sound virtuous – but it is the effective option.

Do that and you can leave the heroism to me and Medium Coat.