So I met God the other day. Well, not quite God, but certainly one of his more senior emissaries. It was getting late on Saturday afternoon, the temperature was approaching 107F, and our house had been without electricity, and therefore air-conditioning, for almost 12 hours.

It was hot. So hot I had to spend the night with a plastic bag of ice on my head. So hot the walls upstairs had broken out into a sweat.

God’s representative turned up in his usual mode of transportation: a white van bearing the blue logo of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power – otherwise known as the LADWP.

Omniscient, omnipresent, usually invisible and almost certainly immortal, the LADWP is the only Creator whose wrath anyone needs to worry about in LA, and the sole reason the city managed to grow from a town of 100,000 to a megatropolis of 17 million in less than 100 years – half the time it took the Normans to put a roof on the old St Paul’s Cathedral.

It was the LADWP, with the help of the Irish water engineer Bill Mulholland, that first brought power and water to LA by stealing it from Owen’s Valley, amid gun battles, drownings and mass corruption. Now it is the largest municipal utility in the whole of the United States – and, incidentally, one of the dirtiest, getting almost half its power from coal. And when the air-conditioning goes out on a 107F day, you are at its mercy.

As you would expect, communicating with God can be tricky. You spend a lot of time on hold. Information is vague, and possibly allegorical. All of which gives you time to think about the biblical power at the LADWP’s disposal: 60,000 megawatt hours per day, to be precise. And it keeps growing. Air-conditioners, plasma TVs, mobile phones, laptop computers, they all suck on the metaphorical breast of the LADWP. Does the Mayor of LA have 60,000 megawatts of power?

I don’t think so. Eventually, God’s emissary showed up. “Yep,” he confirmed, as he spannered our circuit breaker. “You’re out.” How long before we’re back on again? I asked. Air whistled through teeth.

I told him about my one-week-old son, who was being slowly baked upstairs.

“Ah, you’d be amazed at what those things can withstand,” said the technician, as though he was talking about the transformer up the street. Perhaps he believed, like the French author Corinne Maier, that having a child these days is an act of environmental irresponsibility – the creation of yet another little consumer, ready to plug his 50in TV into the grid.

Or perhaps he was just too hot, like me. Whatever the case, the ten grand it would take to hoist a solar panel up to our roof has never seemed like such a good deal.

Yes, God might still be great in this city. But it would be greater, I think, to do without Him.

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