The denture venturers are on the rampage. The Saga louts are running amok. When superannuated Rolling Stone Keith Richards fell out of a coconut tree while sunbathing in Fiji, we should have known that the baby boomers had no intention of going gentle into that good night. And now we can be sure.

How? Our beloved Foreign and Commonwealth Office appears to have sorted those little problems we've been having in Iraq and Afghanistan and has turned its considerable clout to the burning issue of our age: thrombosis-generation thrill-seekers causing holiday havoc. No kidding. An FCO report for its Know Before You Go campaign found that one in five over-55 Brits abroad is taking risks they wouldn't contemplate at home; one in ten isn't even following safety advice they would give their own children; and, wait for it, more than half drink more alcohol than usual.

Some of us go in for bungee-jumping or jet-skiing. Sometimes we have embarrassing mishaps on mopeds or in swimming pools - and occasionally we shout, apparently. In its desperation to dissuade bus-pass-waving crazies from letting the side down, the Foreign Office falls back on a string of anonymous patronising parodies: "I suffered a massive gout attack"; "My husband was rendered incapable with drink," etc. The conclusion is that while it's fine to be over 55 and over there and even "to have fun" - well, thanks for that - we need to be sensible and, above all, well-insured.

Chief witness for the prosecution in this report appears to be one Rania Kossiori, British vice-consul in Rhodes, who opines: "Most problems that we see with the older generation of Brits arise from over-consumption of alcohol and food. Drinking and staying too long in the sun can make you ill and undertaking strenuous activity like going swimming or snorkelling after a large meal can put you in unnecessary danger."

With typical timing, this 56-year- old is due to disembark at Rhodes International next week to link up with other feckless fiftysomethings for seven days of frolics in the sun. I'll be wearing my dark glasses, lest Mrs K is there to check me out, and I'll go prepared, just in case. You can imagine it, can't you? "Ahem. Let's see. Word-search puzzles, travel kettle, Ovaltine, Per Una beige cardie OK, welcome to Rhodes, but watch it with the retsina and don't try anything silly on a moped."

The post-Second World War generation has been redefining the seven ages of man (and woman) ever since we bounced out of our Silver Cross prams. In the swinging sixties we were bolshie teenagers, freed from social conventions by revolting French students, the Pill, women's lib and gay emancipation. (Maybe it's easy to exaggerate this process. A great amateur production in Aboyne last weekend of the 1934 Cole Porter musical Anything Goes, which parodies modern excess, reminded me of how shocked the Edwardians were by the permissiveness of the inter-war younger generation.) Anyway, now we're re-inventing what used to be dreaded "middle age" and we're going to become the stroppiest wrinklies ever known. It's no less than we deserve, because it's a generation that has been caught in a demographic vice.

As a child on continental summer holidays, I encountered a world in which most women over about 50 seemed to wear headscarves and black, shapeless clothes. My memory holds the image of a group of them in a market in Sorrento, twittering like a flock of overgrown blackbirds. I remember my grandmother as a kindly, grey-haired, birdlike old lady who wore a hairnet and smelled of mothballs.

Then came a generation who had grown up during the war, and who were enriched by the explosion in property values and inflation-proofed pensions. Today, over-55s account for 70% of Britain's richest people.

A long way down the income scale from them, a group you could describe as the "young old" seem to spend half their lives on holiday. An estimated 200,000 pre-retirement Brits are now taking gap years.

But it's a golden age that isn't going to last. Many of us will be obliged to work well beyond normal retirement age to supplement our plundered pensions and help our debt-ridden offspring get their feet on the property ladder. (A few days ago, a friend told me one of her three sons had suggested, not altogether jokingly, that she and her husband swap their £300,000 home for a caravan and give the boys £100,000 each to buy a flat.) With so many younger women working, we already form the bulk of volunteers - keeping social services and our communities going as well as looking after our own frail, elderly parents and the children we carried on bearing well into our forties. And when we occasionally get to put our feet up, there's plenty of news that seems designed to depress us.

Yesterday we were told that new research confirmed that women lose some of their ability to store protein as muscle as they age, so it's harder to stay fit after 50. And we're informed that you don't have to be a leggy teenager staggering around a pedestrian precinct on Saturday night to have a drink problem and that the new binge drinkers are women who sip their way through a few glasses of Pinot Grigio with their dinner each night.

The term "Saga lout" turns out to have been coined not by the author Alan Bennett, who is often credited with it, but Dr Peter Rice, a psychiatrist who writes about baby boomers growing old disgracefully. He says the typical Saga lout acquired a taste for drinking at home in the 1970s and 1980s when alcohol prices dropped, and now drinks steadily - though even he is not entirely convinced by the Foreign Office thesis that the yobbish behaviour of our senior citizens abroad represents a threat to public order.

It's hard to imagine a bigger waste of taxpayers' money than this overblown piece of creative writing. It's easy to spot their agenda. It's the start of the tourist season and Mrs Kossiori et al don't want to be encumbered with the problems of ageing hedonists like me.

Then there's the travel-insurance industry to cater for. The FCO would be better off exposing it. My fighting-fit octogenarian father and his equally sprightly wife are planning a fortnight in Barbados.

Several insurance companies they contacted wouldn't cover them at all. Saga, the company that supposedly caters for older people who have difficulty finding cover elsewhere, quoted them an eye-watering £1800. After much finger-walking, they accepted a quote of £850. Needless to say, it'll be their last trip to the Caribbean. No wonder many older people risk travelling abroad without insurance.

I'll be taking a few ripping yarns with me to Rhodes and there may be a corner for my Travel Scrabble. But the FCO report is going in the bin.

anne.johnstone@theherald.co.uk