IT’S HARD to concentrate when you keep wanting to look out of the window. Especially when the view consists of an angry torrent of muddy water, carrying rocks, plants and dead animals down the vertical face of the Santa Monica Mountains into your small, flood-prone backyard.

Ah, yes, it’s rainy season in Hollywood. Nothing unusual about that, you might think — except that California has been under emergency drought conditions for the past half a decade. Oh, how we all wanted some rain. And oh, how we wish it was sunny now.

If you think the English are obsessed with the weather, try watching the evening news in Los Angeles. Every day, for the past three months, the lead story has been the same: “Oh-My-God-It’s-Raining!” The rain headlines continued throughout the Asian tsunami and the Iraqi elections and don’t look likely to end any time soon. Not, at least, while there is footage of $5 million mansions in Beverly Hills tobogganing off mountains. It’s fun to watch, until it happens to your house. Which is why I can’t stop looking out of the window . . .

Before we continue, let me explain: rain in Los Angeles is not the same as it is elsewhere. In Los Angeles, rain means drowning in your car at an intersection because 10in of water fell in 24 hours. Rain means 3,000 tons of loose mud, created by the raging wildfire of the previous summer, turning your local school into a landfill. Rain means the Los Angeles River — which I used to laugh at, because I thought it was an ironically named concrete drain — increasing its flow three thousand fold in one day.

In Los Angeles, rain doesn’t fall in inches; it falls in cubic kilometres. This is the city whose weather is the subject of a national bestseller. The title? Ecology of Fear.

As I write, this is what the rain is doing to Southern California: cars are shunting into each other on Sunset Boulevard because the traffic lights are out; in the coastal town of La Conchita, the population has fled after a mudslide last month killed ten people. Meanwhile, on the mountain road above Ayres Manor, an asteroid-sized crater, caused by the weight of floodwater, has appeared in the tarmac. And, as if by magic, ten more tons of mud has landed outside my window.

I blame the Los Angeles Times. It was that newspaper, in 1934, which told its readers: “No place on Earth offers greater security to life and greater freedom from natural disasters than Southern California.”

Next in my crosshairs is Bill Mulholland, the Irish immigrant and engineer, who raised an army of 5,000 to divert water 233 miles from the Owens River to a dusty hamlet called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles (or The Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels). A dusty hamlet suddenly became a major city. Moviemakers, attracted to the instant gratification of nearby beach, alpine and desert locations, could hardly believe their luck.

What followed was one of the most insane, short-termist construction booms in American history. Entire postal districts were built in the path of fires that have destroyed the landscape for thousands of years; suburbs appeared in the middle of bear reserves; Hollywood homes were scattered over the Santa Monica Mountains without any regard for something as tedious as drainage. And let’s not forget the huge, grumbling faultlines running beneath it all.

Hence the residents of Los Angeles live in perpetual fear of being immolated, eaten by wild animals, washed off the face of the Earth or levelled by an earthquake.

The amusing thing, of course, is that outsiders believe that we Angelinos live in a perpetual 72-degree oceanside paradise. “Whenever I talk to you,” an editor once told me, “I picture you in flip-flops, by the pool.”

It would, of course, be more accurate to picture me in a cagoule, by a sandbag. But that, of course, is the thrill of Los Angeles: it rarely ever plays itself. It lets you believe the hype, then punishes you later. Five years of drought; then enough rain to fill the Pacific.

This year, the Academy Award should go to Los Angeles itself.

• ACCORDING to Ecology of Fear, Angelinos have it relatively easy this year: on Near Year’s Day, 1934, residents of Bel Air suffered their entire annual average rainfall in a single 12-hour deluge.

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