A Historic Moment: Birth of the FIS

In my Stephen Hawking piece in The Sunday Times yesterday, I mentioned in passing that Hawking had once attacked me in print as a failed intellectual. This, I wrote, I wore as a badge of pride - what other kind of intellectuals are there? Now the great and good Frank Wilson has suggested the formation of a Failed Intellectuals Society.
'I think we should assume,' Frank writes, 'since Hawking directly designated you as such, that you are, as it were, the first in line of apostolic succession, with the power to confer dignity and powers on others.'
I have, with a simple but infinitely graceful flick of my diamond-encrusted mouse, accepted and given myself the title of Supreme Failure. Frank is vice-president. Others will be accepted according to demanding criteria which I haven't yet invented and following a ceremony much more bizarre than anything dreamed of by the Masons, though I may steal their noose and rolled up trouser leg.