Yesterday evening after three hours editing my single chapter in the library I got on the train in Redfern. It was six o'clock, the sour hour of the homebound commuters, and I went upstairs and sat down next to a thin young Asian girl who looked like she wouldn't spill over into my seat. As the train pulled out of the station, I slowly became aware of a voice reciting quietly in the corner of the carriage.

At first I thought it was somebody on their mobile, but instead of the usual public-transport monologue (I'm in the train. We just left Stanmore. Etc. ) I slowly became aware that the voice was preaching. I looked around, surreptitiously, (already knowing that it wouldn't do to catch the eye of the reciter) and easily spotted her , marooned in a desert of unoccupied seats, surrounded by sullen work-worn faces all staring stubbornly in another direction. She was a middle aged woman, with long grey hair tied in a pony tail: on the seat beside her was an old ladies handbag which she stroked to the rhythm of her own voice as she recited a litany of natural disasters (2003, earthquake in Pakistan, 137, 000 people killed. 2004, tsunami in Asia, 200, 000 dead. Mudslide in Bali, 25000 dead. And so on). When she ran out of natural disasters, she started on the glory of Jesus (Jesus can do anything. He can save the lives and souls of everyone on this train...It reminded me of the stickers we used to see around school advertising TAFE courses. Girls can do anything- take up a trade! They were supposed to convince us to become automechanics instead of teenage mothers) . When she got fed up with Jesus, she went on, in the same measured tone, to blessing the contents of the train.

She blessed the train back to front and upside down, with all its sorry human cargo included. She blessed the young suit squeezing his pimple as he looked at himself in the window and the lady in red polyester with her red vinyl bag cushioning her head while she napped. She blessed the woman with the grimy child who had somehow contrived to shove her pram through the doors of the train at Town Hall and colonise half the ground-floor of the train and she blessed the train driver and she blessed the students reading their economics notes and she blessed the plumber with the blue esky and the nagging wife and the silent moustachioed husband hunched down behind the Daily Telegraph.

The blessings started to get on our nerves, more than the mudslides and the earthquakes and far more than baby Jesus. By the time we arrived at Petersham there was a growing groundswell of irritation in the carriage, the averted faces starting to turn warningly in her direction like a field of fractious sunflowers. The people sitting in the seats closest to hers got up and moved downstairs to hang off a pole in peace and quiet. The relentless tempo of the blessing started to sound ominous- a drumbeat in the jungle warning of impending disaster.

Eventually, somebody shouted Shut up!!!! I looked around, but none of the closed faces gave anything away. We were at Lewisham. The lady got up, collected her bag and walked, soft-shoed and still blessing us, out onto the platform.

Spam to brighten your day

This is from a catholic elementary school test. Kids were asked questions about old & new testaments.
1. In the first book of the bible, Guinessis. God got tired of creating the world so he took the Sabbath off.
2. Adam & Eve were created from an apple tree. Noah's wife was Joan of ark. Noah built an ark & the animals came in pears.
3. Lots wife was a pillar of salt during the day, but a ball of fire during the night.
4. Jews were a proud people and throughout history they had truble with unsympathetic genitals.
5. Sampson was a strongman who let himself be led astray by a jezebel like Delilah.
6. Samson slayed the philistines with the axe of the apostles.
7. Moses led the Jews to the red sea where they made unleavened bread which is bread without any ingredients.
8. Egyptians were all drowned in the dessert. Afterwards, Moses went up to mount cyanide to get the Ten Commandments.
9. The first commandments was when eve told Adam to eat the apple.
10. The seventh commandment is thou shalt not admit adultery.
11. Moses died before he ever reached Canada. Then Joshua led the Hebrews in the battle of Geritol.
12. The greatest miricle in the bible is when Joshua told his son to stand still and he obeyed him.
13. David was a Hebrew king who was skilled at playing the liar. he fought the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in biblical times.
14. Solomon, one of Davids sons, had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.
15. When Mary heard she was the mother of Jesus, she sang the Magna Carta.
16. When the three wise guys from the east side arrived they found Jesus in the manager.
17. Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption.
18. St. John the blacksmith dumped water on his head.
19. Jesus enunciated the golden rule, which says to do unto others before they do one to you. he also explained a man doth not live by sweat alone.
20. It was a miricle when Jesus rose from the dead and managed to get the tombstone off the entrance.
21. The people who followed the lord were called the 12 decibels.
22. The Epistels were the wives of the apostles.
23. One of the oppossums was st. Matthew who was also a taximan.
24. St. Paul cavorted to Christianity, he preached holy acrimony which is another name for marraige
25. Christians have only one spouse. This is called monotony.

I would like to disagree with the Buddhists and say that the absence of desire is a horrible thing. In support of this claim I will describe an encounter with it from a number of years ago.

December 2004 , Northern Sudan, some days before Christmas
I arrive in Dongola after six days cycling on a dirt road which runs beside the Nile and at times has trouble imprinting itself on the plain of glittering gibbers which stretches out on either side. I am not especially fit and have been permanently dehydrated throughout the trip: also, at some point in this six days I have succumbed to the ubiquitous fiction that the Nile water of northern Sudan is the 'best in the world', and drunk from the river. Somebody has given me a kilogram of dusty dates from their store and it's hard to tell if the culprit is the dates or the water, but I am quickly losing the will to live and am feeling a creeping malaise which seems to originate in my stomach. When I arrive in Dongola and feel bitumen under my wheels I start to cry with relief.

I stay in Dongola for three days. In this time I meet Marcin, his friend Anka and two Czechs all travelling together in a mobile new democracy whose decision-making process seems to me like a good argument for dictatorship. He gives me some medicine for intestinal parasites and I am charmed by his accent, his scarf, his black rimmed glasses which, I will discover later, can only be worn in circumstances where peripheral vision is not required. He is very nice and this encounter will change my life, but it is not a matter of immediate concern to me.

What I really want is my appetite back. And it comes, slowly, in increments, as I revive. On the first day, I eat a piece of fish. The parasites revolt. They want green apple fanta and cake. They punish me for the rest of the day. On the second day I manage two meals by placating them with heavily sugared tea. But it is not until the fourth day that I am really hungry again.

It's difficult to explain the quality of the feeling of wellbeing which the desire for food creates in me. I leave Dongola with a packet of bread, some cheese and a couple of tomatoes: enough to last me a day or so. By 11:00 I have already had five meals, stopping to scoff sandwiches in patches of shade beside roadside hits and wells, under a tree at the periphery of a cornfield, between the crumbling mud walls of towns abandoned to the flooding river . There is a metallic smell of earth and vegetation coming off the alluvial flats in waves where the sun hits them, reminding me of the market garden my parents had when I was a child.

For this day, I don't think of love (following me at a distance in its black glasses and scarf), or literature, or the future. It is enough for me to feel this hunger, which tells me that I am alive.

A weekend depression of a black and comprehensive variety, brought on by too much coffee and a less than impressive PowerPoint presentation on my goddamned thesis last Friday. More or less cured by Monday morning by the therapeutic combination of 30 episodes of the Gilmore Girls, a leg of lamb, ten bottles of wine and the vision of a pair of mating stick insects on our window (would a stick insect give a flying fuck about a thesis?). I can throroughly recommend this cure.

My thesis is starting to coagulate, slowly, at the back of my mind. I catch frequent glimpses of the edge of it emerging and feel it lying there at the very limits of the known world like Australia on an old map, amorphous and incomplete, a temptation and a terror. (Terror Australis) It is guarded by sea monsters that rear their unrealistically long necks and bare their nightmare teeth when I turn towards land, hissing at me as I make for the shore.

But I am entering the territory of total panic where doubt is not an option, the zone of compulsion where there is no choice but to proceed, sea monsters in hot pursuit and an unmapped coastline veiling its face behind the white spume of the shorebreak ahead. Arriba!

Warning to Jorge: contains rodents

There is a family of small creatures living in the long grass near the train line in Lewisham where I cycle on my way to the university. The first day I notice them, I see a ginger cat too, lying in the sun with its stomach to the sky, eyes narrowed. The weeds around it are alive with something but I don't see what it is. The things don't flap like birds or bound like kittens- it is more of a scuttling motion, and they are fast enough to avoid identification, at least on this first encounter. The ginger cat is undisturbed.

The third time, I see that they are rats. Big ones, small ones, fat ones, skinny ones, racing industriously back and forth on their rat business between the retirement home and the train tracks. Every time I pass they are there, and they seem to be getting bolder. After the initial surprise wears off, I start to get squeamish. I am glad that I'm on a bike and that there's no chance that they will choose to run their rat errands between my feet.

Then I start to think about the ginger cat. Why doesn't it do something? I get more and more disgusted and start to metaphorise : the cat is an analogy for the human race, which has lost its hunger and is no longer intent on survival; it aims to get through its days as comfortably and uneventfully as possible. We lie in the metaphorical grass by the train track, balls to the sun. scratching our ginger arses and waiting for the next tasty morsel to be dropped into our plate. This line of thought occupies the remaining four kilometres to the university, my disgruntlement with the species definitive proof that my internal weather is synchronising with the tantrums of spring: squalls and sunshine, sunshine and squalls, five times a day.