‘So,’ the-God-who-is-above-all-others boomed at me, ‘did you hate your family in order to follow my Son and further my Kingdom on Earth?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ I replied. ‘I love my family and I wasn’t going to hate them to follow you or anyone else.’

God tutted, a sound like a clap of thunder. ‘Mark him down in the book,‘ he growled to the grotesque creature beside him. It was like something out of a third-rate horror film with bat’s wings and multiple eyes. It dutifully scratched away in the large book it held open in front of it.

‘Did you, then, accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour?’ asked the Almighty.

I squinted, my hand over my eyes as the dazzling light that obscured his face almost blinded me. ‘Once. Yes,’ I admitted.

‘I suppose, once is good enough. And after that did you lead a blameless, righteous life?’

‘I doubt it. I did my best but righteousness wasn’t particularly high on my agenda.’

‘Another black mark,’ God said to his ugly angel. ‘Tell me,’ he said, his shiny visage turned again in my direction, ‘did you feed the hungry, visit the sick and clothe the naked?’

‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘Did you? Or having created us, did you just abandon us to manage as best we could, all the time carping about how we were going about it?’

‘You see my dilemma, don’t you?’ he said, suddenly acting all reasonable. ‘You gave your life to Jesus sixty-five of your Earth years ago and I am bound to honour that; you know, ‘once saved always saved’, as I promise somewhere or other. It’s just that it doesn’t look as if you’ve upheld your end of the bargain.’

‘I thought you did it all,’ I said.

The Almighty sighed, his perfumed breath gusting through the great hall. ‘Did you, for example, manage to avoid fornication, gossip, unnatural sex, thievery, rebelliousness, drunkenness, drag acts, adultery, coveting (whatever that is) and, erm, sex.‘

‘Most of it. Not so much the sex that you seem so obsessed with. As I’m sure you already know, being omniscient and all that, I was in a same-sex relationship before you killed me off.’

‘Christ!’, he spluttered, the Heavenly sputum drenching all who were present. ’You do know this excludes you from my special club, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Have you never read what old whatsisname said about this sort of thing? He warned you.’

‘I don’t care what old whatsisname said. I don’t care what you think either. I’ve treated other people fairly, tried to be kind and helped others when I could. I’ve never cheated or taken advantage of anyone. I’ve never taken a life and I haven’t, unlike you, ordered a murder. If that’s not good enough for you, then that’s your problem, not mine.

‘You think so?’ he sneered. ‘Not when I hold all the cards.’

‘Do you know,’ I said, with nothing left to lose, ‘You’re the worst excuse for a God imaginable. And you are imagined. You’re petulant, impetuous and unjust. Your solution to every problem is to torture and kill people. Your so-called salvation plan is muddled and contrived…’

‘Enough! Take him below!’

A cartoon demon appears by my side and prods me in the ribs with his pitch-fork. I wake suddenly and sit bolt upright in the pew. ‘You were snoring,’ Dennis says. We’re at the funeral of a friend who, for some reason – insurance maybe – insisted on having it in church. The minister is still delivering his soporific eulogy, hardly mentioning our friend and droning on instead about Jesus.

‘Sorry,’ I whisper to Dennis. ‘I just saw God. In my dream, which I know is the only way you can see him.

‘Shush,’ hisses the octogenarian American in the row behind.

‘Dreams and in your imagination,’ I can’t resist adding.