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.