After school I watched telly with Ben and made all the presenters say ridiculous things again. So on Blue Peter, when one of the presenters was trying to talk about a safari park where they were trying to get white rhinos to breed, I had the other presenter keep coming in front of her and singing ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’. And then on Newsround I wished they’d report everything in sausage-and-mash – you know, that game where every time you get a word beginning with ‘s’ you say ‘sausage’ and every time it begins with ‘m’ you say ‘mash’. So this report about the European Space Agency became a report about the European Sausage Agency. And they said that the European Sausage Agency was hoping to put a sausage rocket on the mash, and they’d be able to find out a great deal about the mash of sausage. Then there was a quiz show and I wished one of the teams would answer ‘custard’ to every question while the other team answered ‘bum’. It was pretty funny. Ben was in fits.

But.

The problem was that all this stuff was, like, trivial, you know? It was kind of fun – well, yeah, it was fun, let’s be fair, but it was still sort of . . . unsatisfying.

I thought about it later that evening, as I was floating about in my bedroom (I’d wished for it to be zero-gravity in my room, just for a change) and drinking a ginger beer I’d wished for. At first everything – all the furniture and the ginger beer – went floating about the room as well, until I wished for it all to behave normally but for the room to be zero-grav just as far as I was concerned, so that was all right.

I still didn’t know what I really wanted. The problem was, it almost didn’t make sense to want things any more. Because how can you want something when you can just get it, immediately, just by asking for it? When there’s no gap between wanting something and getting it, then getting it doesn’t mean anything. There’s no tension. No relief or surprise or sudden joy.

The most successful wishes, I realized, were the ones where I did good stuff for other people. Because when you unexpectedly get good stuff from someone else’s wish, then it does mean something – there’s room to feel surprise, relief or sudden joy. So maybe I should think of some more wishes to help other people?

And try thinking bigger. I mean, I could make Scorpus’s dad a nicer person just by wishing for it. I could cure people with terminal illnesses! I shouldn’t be wasting my wishes on making presenters on children’s telly say silly things to make Ben laugh. With all the power I had, I should be doing something much more serious.

But . . . what?