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 I 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. Every one was able to see some of the worst pictures in the world, one of which was my own 2 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.

Stephen Pile Retold by Stephen Waller