The referee blew his whistle for full time. I wished that Tottenham would win the Premier League that season. At least that would surprise quite a few people, even if I wasn’t one of them.

I wished myself back in my bedroom. I was actually starting to feel a bit bored, which is ridiculous when you’ve got almost a million wishes at your disposal. What could I do?

The superhero thing. Maybe I hadn’t explored that properly yet. Obviously Scorpus and Old Man Bartrum weren’t worthy opponents. They were pushovers. I needed someone who was more of a match for me.

Most superheroes have some kind of arch-enemy. Like, Batman has the Joker and Spiderman has the Green Goblin and the Fantastic Four have Doctor Doom. And the arch-enemy has the power to hurt them, threaten them, frustrate them. The superhero always wins in the end, but the arch-enemy can give them a pretty hard time along the way. And even when the superhero finally triumphs, the arch-enemy usually slips away with a promise to come back and make trouble another day. That’s part of the fun of it.

I needed an enemy who could make a fight of it.

First, I wished for all my powers back, the same ones as before, but I gave myself a different costume. I wished I was dressed all in black leather, with lots of silver studs and stars and stuff, and a big silver letter A on my chest. I thought it looked a bit tougher, somehow. More manly.

Now I needed an arch-enemy.

This was going to be fun. You know, I’ve often thought when I leave school I’d like to get a job writing stories for comics. Come to think of it, I could just wish that was my job, if I was serious. But I dunno. I didn’t need a job now, did I?

I forced my thoughts back to my arch-enemy. I wished first of all that he could fly and was super strong. But he needed something different, something to make him unique . . . I thought back to Bartrum hitting me with a frying pan. How about if my arch-enemy had frying pans for hands? No, something a bit deadlier, maybe. Hammers! With which he battered his opponents. Super-strong hammers that didn’t break. Hammer Man? Hammerhand? No, wait, one hand could be a hammer. The other one could be a circular saw. And suddenly I got the whole concept: Power-Tool Man! His head was a pneumatic drill. His body was a workbench. His legs were those things that workmen use to flatten tarmac, what are they called? Piledrivers, that’s it.

‘I wish Power-Tool Man existed, and I wish he was coming to get me!’

There was a splintering crash as my bedroom door flew off its hinges.

There stood Power-Tool Man. His power-drill head was pointing straight at me, twirling round and round. His circular-saw arm was raised.