Which leaves us with the inner children - and I can't, to be frank, do much about them either, but my purpose is not to change things but just to get a little something off that famously overburdened anatomical region, my chest.
You see, in frozen foods this morning I overheard a conversation between a man and a woman that ran as follows: he asked her how her lockdown had been, to which she replied "lovely" and he said "how so?" and she said, beaming, that she had devoted most of it to rediscovering her inner child.
Why is it that snippets overheard are always so much juicier than any conversation you or I have ever had within the tilt-slab walls of the Holy Sepulchre of Countdown?
I'd have loved to have listened longer but there's only so much dithering one can plausibly do in front of a display of frozen peas and so I heard just one word of the man's response before I moved out of earshot and that word was - and I quote - "oh".
I understood that oh. It is the oh of turning into what one hopes is the open boulevard of conversational motoring and finding it's a dead end.
But what exactly, I asked myself as I wandered into baking needs, does one say to anyone who claims to have rediscovered their inner child? I suppose you might start with "which one?"
Is it your inner newborn that you've rediscovered, the mewler and puker, the inarticulate sprawler, the chronically incontinent? Or perhaps your inner toddler, slave to its impulses, burbling without meaning, in need of constant supervision, giggling when indulged, enraged when thwarted?
Or yet again, maybe you've found your inner prepubescent, the manipulable enthusiast, victim of fads and crazes, still five years short of critical judgment, a blank slate on which the conscienceless can write whatever they want?
Or maybe it's your inner adolescent, plaything of hormones, given to crushes and bouts of gloom and rushes of delirium and sulks as deep and long as the Mariana Trench?
For each of us has been all of these and more, and the point, of course, is that we aren't them any longer. Our medium is time and it goes in only one direction and takes us with it and we change as we go.
So the notion that our developmental states of being are somehow locked away in cupboards deep inside us, bound and gagged, awaiting joyous rediscovery and liberation, is well - how shall I put it? - nonsense.
To which she might reply that her inner child is none and all of these. It is the innocent soul that laughs when it is happy and cries when it is sad, that delights in butterflies and long grass and sand between its toes and stamps its little feet in puddles and makes no plans and puts nothing away for a rainy day and lives and sings in the present tense as a blackbird or a cricket does. That is the inner child she's rediscovered.
To which I don't think there's an answer, or at least not one that's isn't sure to sever relations. However much the man may have been tempted to say phooey, or to remark that he himself had spent the lockdown rediscovering his inner schoolmaster, in the end there's only one thing safely sayable and he said it. Oh.
