Paul’s discovery and first use of magic turns an extraordinary power into a practical, if erratic, skill. After a night of drinking and an arrest, he makes a policeman bite his truncheon; later, at home, a spoiled pint of milk and a boiling kettle help him understand why his first attempts have not worked. The episode moves from bravado to failure, then from failure to a working theory: magic depends not simply on snapping one’s fingers, but on directing the will toward a specific correction.

The arrest and the first attempt

Paul’s night begins with an improvised effort to drink without drinking. At one pub he orders six pints of lemonade shandy without the lemonade; after the barman refuses to serve him another, he goes elsewhere and orders ginger-beer shandy without the ginger beer. He insists that he is not used to strong drink, then falls over. Bystanders help him into the gutter, where he remains until a policeman arrives and arrests him.

Paul meets the arrest with the confidence of someone who believes his new powers exempt him from ordinary authority. He tells the policeman that he is a wizard and, when the officer tries to seize him, pushes him aside and warns him to show respect. The policeman remains sceptical and starts to handcuff him. Paul narrows his eyes, takes a deep breath, and clicks his fingers, expecting his magic to intervene. Nothing happens. The gap between his declaration and the result is immediate: he claims power, but has not yet learned how to make it act.

A command that takes effect

As the policeman presses him against a wall and reaches for his handcuffs, Paul works out what went wrong. He had formed the idea of making the officer eat his truncheon only after the first finger-snap. He tries again, this time holding the intended result in mind before acting. The policeman lets go, steps back, and makes a faint mewing sound. In slow motion, he takes the black riot stick from his belt, raises it to his mouth, and bites it.

The action gives Paul a result, but not a polished demonstration. A faint ping suggests that the officer may have broken a tooth, and Paul jokes about serving the truncheon as meat before walking away. His joke sustains the comic tone, but the scene’s change is clear: the policeman’s attempted arrest has become an involuntary act under Paul’s influence. Paul has used magic successfully, although he has not yet shown restraint or mastery. He then walks straight into a deep, oily puddle, an undignified end to his brief sense of triumph.

The dream that proves to be memory

A kind providence gets Paul home, where he closes the door, collapses onto his bed, and falls asleep. In his strange dream, he fights goblins, discovers unearthly powers, and forces a policeman into a painful and embarrassing public act. Only when he wakes, in the brief interval before his hangover fully asserts itself, does he understand that the dream was not invention but memory. The recognition recasts the preceding spectacle as something he has actually done; his immediate concern is not the nature of his powers but the embarrassment of having made the joke about truncheon meat.

This delayed recognition gives the event a second, quieter turn. During the arrest, Paul behaves as if he understands his wizardry; afterward, he has to reconstruct the night from what seems at first like an absurd dream. The sequence therefore distinguishes possessing a power from comprehending it. The first successful act has already happened, but Paul’s understanding of that act remains incomplete.

Learning what magic does

The next morning, Paul takes the milk in his flat personally. It has gone off, and he interprets this ordinary failure as an affront in a life already shaped by strange forces and expectations. He gives the milk a fierce scowl and snaps his fingers. The kettle boils instead. The mistake is small but instructive: the magic has produced an effect, just not the one he intended.

Paul tries again, concentrating on the milk and imagining its curdled particles as a village under attack. He visualizes the particles fighting back and the milk becoming pure white, but when he opens his eyes the milk has not changed. He reacts with frustration, snaps his fingers once more, and pours the milk into his tea without looking. It tastes fine, but the episode does not establish that his magic repaired it; Paul’s decisive insight follows from his attempts and their uneven results, not from a clearly demonstrated transformation of the milk.

He concludes that the world is meant to work properly but sometimes sticks, and that magic is a forceful nudge that persuades it to resume its proper function. In his practical metaphor, it is a well-placed clout to a machine casing, not the creation of something impossible. Once he adopts this model, he says he has no further trouble: a finger-snap clears the gloomy, rainy weather, and further snaps produce bread, sausages, bacon, and a bacon sandwich. The early misfires and the policeman’s compelled action thus lead into a broader change in Paul’s conduct. Magic becomes, for him, less a mysterious gift than a method of making reality behave as he thinks it should.