Concrete Pencil: I coulda bin a contender - or a ninja

By the time your baby ankle fat deflated like a badly-cooked soufflé, you were already too ancient to master the cool things that could have turned you into that mysterious figure that gazes into the middle distance and cleans up at parties.

A glance at Google (a haven for those like me who rarely clean up at parties) reveals that the best age to learn languages is between three and seven, that there's a nine-year-old from Wisconsin running around playing jaw-slackening blues guitar and that Mount Everest has been conquered by a 15-year-old boy.

Oh, and if you were planning on becoming a dark soul hell-bent on avenging the murder of your loved ones, forget it. Apparently, ninjas start training at the age of five.

In the days when I wore knitted jumpers, watched Transformers and ate mud, this was no big deal.

Now demons haunt my dreams, reminding me that I will never be the world's youngest shepherd, that tap-dancing children from Britain's Got Talent laugh at me in gold-plated hot tubs, and that NASA will soon send a whipper-snapper to the moon with less hair on their head than I have in my eyebrows.

This, of course, is completely someone else's fault.

If I wanted, I could probably hit the gym and chisel myself a passable six-pack. I could skip the pub for a few months and learn to play Comfortably Numb. I could take lessons in Farsi, or make a half-decent Death Star replica out of Lego.

But this is hard, and hard is the domain of madmen. I'd much rather have had these skills drilled into me from birth against my will, like a free paper shoved in your eye as you emerge from a Tube station.

It seems I am not alone. I conducted a slapdash office survey, and the wails of anguish rose like kettle steam. I now know that my colleagues are tormented by an inability to play the guitar, perform close-up magic, make paper aeroplanes, speak Chinese and fly.

It is easy to blame our parents for this horrible failure. But did we seriously expect them to find the time to feed us, clothe us, love us and teach us how to cut through a man's achilles tendon with a ninja star from 200 yards?

No. Instead, we should be mature and realistic.

I suggest waiting until one of these genius kids invents a time machine, and travelling back to pester our young selves into learning the tuba.

On second thoughts, I've heard tutoring is hard. I wonder if I could hire a babysitter to do it?

Is there something you wish you were forced to master from an early age? Bare your soul below.