You are apart from the world, the Wish-Answerer said. It was a relief to hear that posh newsreader’s voice again. At least someone was talking to me.

‘I wish I knew why I was here.’

You wished for a world with no problems. But then you yourself faced the problem of what to wish for next. So you had to be removed from the world. To keep it free of problems. As you yourself had wished.

Well, that’s exactly what I’d thought. Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life dangling around here in the dark, I’d have to allow a few problems back into the world.

The wish about nobody dying – that would have to go too. We didn’t want that many problems. And the wish about everybody being nice all the time – well, that had been, er, nice in some ways, but you couldn’t really go on like that. Even just a day of it had started to give me the heebie-jeebies.

‘All right,’ I said to the Wish-Answerer. ‘Here’s what I wish. I want the world to go back to exactly how it was one second before I wished everyone was nice all the time and that people would stop dying, OK?’

*

The scene changed like a film cut. I was back in my bedroom, hovering around in zero-grav, holding a glass of ginger beer with a straw in it. It was about seven in the evening. I could hear the dog barking out in the garden. Downstairs, the telly was on and I heard the toilet flush in the bathroom. The world was up and running again.

I finished the ginger beer, positioned myself above the bed, wished for gravity to return to normal and plumphed down on to the duvet.

Right.

Now what?

It’s fair to say I was feeling a bit frazzled. Events of the last few days had been a bit . . . extreme. I’d changed things so often and changed them back again that I hardly knew where I was any more.

I had almost infinite power, but in a strange kind of way I felt almost powerless. Because I no longer had any direct contact with reality – it wasn’t like I was a person in the world any more, a person that could actually be affected by stuff that went on around me.

It was more like the world wasn’t real to me any more. It was a world of Lego, or Play-Doh, that I could just remodel however I wanted.

I’d turned the world into a toy.

People who lose contact with reality are crazy, aren’t they?

Insane.

And I have to say I was feeling pretty insane at this point.

Maybe I should ask the Wish-Answerer what to do? He was the only person – if he was a person – who seemed to know what was going on.

I had a sudden urge for a personal interview.