">	bunch of bananas.... My fingers felt like. A bunch of bananas. They were banana like. I realised then that "bananas" was the most apposite and original simile I could think of! Christ, an exclamation mark!! Shit!!! The wild wind howled like a wolf as I sat forelornly in my lonely room. The lightening flashed!! The rain pounded like a hammer at my window (except it didn't break the window like a real metal hammer would have- and a plastic or rubber hammer wouldn't have made the same amount of noise or had the same dramatic impact.) The lightening flashed!!! ! As my feet, as heavy as lead, made there way to my bed I thought how that it should come to this pretty pass:; My brain was as still as a mill pond as it writhed in the feverish agony of trying to think of an interesting turn of phrase. I had to wade through hundreds of paragraphs of turgid hackneyed shit to get into bed. There it was that in which I decided to join a group of other talentless people- perhaps fellow victims of the Skip Gang, or perhaps congenitally talentless people. In a group such as this is I could learn to take the rough with the smooth, to accept that life is not a bowl of cherries but rather a game of swings and roundabouts. Since then the other members of the group have given me many sorry tales of woe : The novelist, the pop singer, the concert pianist, all described the man in the skip with a balaclava and shot gun. We all decided on a name that would describe this mastermind of crime : "The man In The Skip With A Balaclava And Shot Gun." 25/5/95 I first heard of Declan MaHoolihan three days ago after the publication of his first novel. It was hailed as a masterpiece. Yesterday he opened his first show of paintings, video, VR, sculpture, drawings, ceramics, sites specific and installation pieces at Waddingtons.