More Heroic Failures

 
great failures and people have never forgotten them. 
They arc an example to us all. 
 
 
1 

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The Not Very Good Club of Great Britain 
I
 
am sure that I am not the only one who is not good at 
doing things. If you look at other people, you will see 
that most of them cannot do anything very well. Because 
of this fact, I think people spend too much time talking 
about how good they are. It is much more interesting to 
talk about doing things badly. 
So, in 1976 1 started a club
 
- The Not Very Good Club 
of Great Britain. Anyone who belonged to my club had 
to be not very good at something, for example, fishing, 
polite conversation, trying to talk like famous people. 
We all met and talked about our failures. We had some 
wonderful evenings when people said things like: ‘Yes, 
sheep are difficult’ (a not very good painter). 
In September 1976, I asked twenty of the worst failures 
from the club to meet for dinner at a not very good 
restaurant in London. The food had to wait in the oven 
for more than an hour while we talked about ourselves in 
a boring way. By the time we were ready to eat, the food 
was terrible. 
This first dinner was a wonderful failure and so we 
decided to meet again one evening to play music. We all 
played so badly that we made a terrible noise. 
After this, we decided to show people the pictures that 
we painted. Everyone was able to see some of the worst 
pictures in the world, one of which was my own 
2 

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Last Supper. 
I always get hungry when I look at pictures 
of the Last Supper. So I put real food on to mine. This 
way other people can also enjoy the supper and have a 
piece of St Matthew’s bread or one of St Thomas’s 
chocolate cakes. 
Many people who belong to my club have given me 
information for this book. But the worst failures were 
hard to find because people do not want to talk about 
these things. They don’t realize that to be very bad at 
something you need to work hard and see things 
differently. 
This book tells the stories of the biggest failures that 
we were able to find. If you are worse than this, I will be 
very pleased to hear from you.