Now we have left teenage and excessive drinking behind, most of us have to accept we are not invincible.
Even if I had other ideas, I am cursed with sisters and sons known for their candour.
It is not always easy, but mostly I can appreciate they are protecting me from myself.
It's hard to imagine being so famous and important you get used to people hanging on your every word.
And when you are a politician on a roll, do the very people who should be telling you when you may be about to stuff up and how to rectify it, get reduced to forelock-tugging toadies, who laugh at your unfunny jokes because they are only interested in their own job security?
John Key's recent gaffes make me wonder if his Government needs Supermum (and no, I don't mean the ridiculously dubbed mother-of-the-nation Judy Bailey).
She would be someone who could breeze in, without waiting for an invitation the way television's Supernanny does, take those exhibiting signs of being too big for their boots aside and quietly but firmly tell them to match their feet to their footwear.
I don't go along with that demeaning nonsense of sitting on a naughty step.
What I have in mind is more of a discreet stern word or two, in a setting well away from any snooping media, to bring errant ones into line.
The sort of thing I am thinking of was illustrated in a recent Chris Laidlaw radio interview with Sir Robert Jones.
Sir Robert, referring to his attacks on the late former prime minister and Labour leader Sir Wallace Rowling, said his mother had once pulled him up on this.
She had watched one of his "at Rowling incidents" and had not laughed at it.
"She said to me 'That was a human being you just destroyed and I'd like you to start remembering that'."
Sir Robert said it did stop him.
Supermum could gently take John-boy aside and suggest that if he does not want that alleged nickname from his past life, "the smiling assassin", to be trotted out with increasing regularity, then he needs to pull his head in.
She would tell him that jokes, scripted or not, are not his forte, and that some lessons in elocution would be a better use of his time.
Supermum might also be brave enough to wonder about all that hugging and kissing of the great unshowered at Gallipoli and the photo ops in his bullet-proof vest in Afghanistan.
"You don't want to be suspected of cynically using anything to do with our boys and girls in uniform to further your own popularity. Do you want to be remembered as one of those PMs who couldn't walk two steps without laying a wreath somewhere?" she could say.
The discretion required for Supermum would rule out any uniform involving cone-shaped breasts, capes, a cinched waist and tights.
That's probably a good thing, since likely contenders' only connection with yummy mumminess may be that they have eaten too much of their own excellent baking.
The versatility of Supermum would be such that she could visit any government department to dispense some you've-gone-too-far-now advice whenever she felt it was called for.
No doubt the policy wonks will insist on a pilot scheme for this commendable idea, so where better to start than with those involved in the shabby decision-making over the recent closure of the Phoenix Centre.
As I have already indicated, it was not hard to see there were many unanswered important questions in the supposed evaluation report of the centre.
The weekend report of documents released through the Official Information Act clearly shows those closely associated with this centre, which catered for disruptive pupils, thought so, too.
They made their feelings known, but appear to have been ignored.
Why?On the face of it, it looks as if the Ministry of Education was already convinced it did not want the centre, so it developed a flawed evaluation process including unrealistic outcomes for the pupils attending the centre.
When those involved with the centre made it clear they did not want it shut, that seemed to be a cue to the ministry to speed up plans to close it.
Why?
As well as doing a bit of straight talking, Supermum could take the key decision-makers gently by the hand, and team them with the most badly-behaved pupils now likely to be driving everybody nuts in classrooms.
Their job would be to stick like glue all day to their assigned pupils while paid the bottom hourly rate on the teacher aide scale ($14).
A betting Supermum might suggest it would take less than a week of this to produce a new and sensible decision, but I couldn't possibly comment.
Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
