Deep in the bowels of Whitehall a government warning panel has exploded in a spasm of flashing red lights and whoop-whoop sirens. Quick, scramble the press officers, issue the admonishments. Somewhere out there, people are having fun! And it's not the usual suspects: the “toxic” teenagers or those feckless women bingeing away their looks and fertility. Can you believe it's the oldsters, the over-55s, boozing it up on holiday - never-ending bloody holidays! - when they should be down the garden centre or picking out Per Una cardies in fetching shades of beige?

This week the Foreign Office paused from its missions in Tibet and Darfur to warn us that “older travellers... drink more alcohol while away than they would in the UK”. Besides this startling revelation, with its implied debauchery of aperitifs, wine with dinner - every single night! - and, who knows, nightcap cognacs or queasy-coloured local stickies, was the news that “20 per cent of 55-plus holidaymakers try activities they would not contemplate at home”.

One begins to worry if the FO has any handle on why people travel abroad at all. Do they think we schlep through all that security just to replicate our dreary workaday lives in better weather? Perhaps ministers and civil servants like to emulate our tireless PM with his holiday pile of inspiring biographies. But the rest of us are gasping to be, for a few blessed days, someone new, a wilder, more carefree soul, pulled free from the cotton wool of risk-averse modern life. And it should be no surprise that among the keenest bungee jumpers, jet-skiers, paragliders and hill-trekkers are the over-55s.

They are finally liberated from the tyranny of family holidays, the hourly swabbing of tots with sunblock, the listless soul-sapping evenings in over-lit kiddie-friendly restaurants, sitterless weeks in resorts stuffed with people just like you, because here it's safe and bland and hygienic and they'll warm your baby's bottle without fuss, where in 24 hours a couple might snatch a half-hour of adult talk or a guilty quickie in the en suite because your whole tribe sleeps in one sexless family room.

No wonder when all this fretful care is over, when your reproductive usefulness has expired and life is a little more expendable, you start living it again. The holiday horror stories collated by the Foreign Office - “My husband was rendered incapable with drink”, “I had a motor scooter accident” and “I suffered a massive gout attack” - are meant to alarm over-55s from ever leaving their deckchairs. But I'd guess the fit, bright-eyed, adventurous Saga Louts I know will fall about at this hilarious and patronising parody of their lives, then boggle at the Government's profound misunderstanding of what it now means to be old.

As I walked to the shops in foul weather this week, the sight of an elderly man in a gabardine overcoat and trilby filled me with melancholy that this variety of old person will soon be extinct. Dying out along with the sensible-shoed lady in church hat, the weekly shampoo and set, plastic rain hoods, tweed caps, pipe tobacco and tinned fruit. My parents' generation with their stoicism and gratitude for the simplest care is soon to be replaced by more bolshie and entitled oldies who, one feels, won't go gentle into that good night lying in corridors on hospital trolleys. Not without the bitterest fight.

And those in late middle age now are a uniquely golden generation, whose pensions will provide for a pleasant lifestyle - 70 per cent of Britain's richest people are over 55 - squeezed between the frugal elderly and my own generation, who will need every iota of our ISAs for deposits on our kids' homes or else never winkle them out of the family hutch. These new old sods won't potter about like Foggy, Compo and Clegg, lamenting loveless marriages and getting whimsical about might-have-beens. They divorce rather than endure a miserable final act, keep it up with Viagra, go on gap years, refuse to wait in rocking chairs for their self-absorbed offspring to squeeze out a grandchild.

A friend's mother aged 70 has announced she isn't cooking any more: she's bored of the tyranny of meals. Perhaps this explains Delia's conversion to cheat's cuisine and the old folks you see in M&S gleefully vacuuming up ready-meals. They've served their years at the stove and sink - let Auntie Bessie peel the spuds for a change.

And the new over-50s are the last generation of guilt-free bon viveurs. Last month at a dinner party in which my husband and I were a decade younger than other guests, we snuck off lamely back to our babysitter at midnight, sober because we'd driven to avoid the hassle of minicabs, and left behind the sound of glass-clinking, cheese-scoffing smokers, who were settled in for a long and raucous night.

These days it feels reckless just to spread your bread with butter. A half-bottle of wine a night, surely the foundation of civilisation and sanity, amounts, we are told, to middle-class binge drinking. We're being “targeted” by government anti-drinking initiatives. You can ignore the ministerial funsuckers, but it's too late, their needling, mimsy warnings play on a loop in our heads.

We long for a time of innocence when no one knew the risks. The success of the American drama series Mad Men owes less to its witty explication of the 1960s advertising industry than its vignettes of behaviour now as bizarre and verboten as bear-baiting. Look, a pregnant woman drinking and smoking, a man driving home after a few vodka gimlets, some flagrantly pissed adults in charge of children. Similarly, the movie Charlie Wilson's War was most enjoyable for evoking an age when a congressman could drink Martinis in a hot-tub full of strippers without having to beg God for forgiveness. Denied adult vices, we are reduced to voyeurs.

And so all you over-indulging oldsters, listen up. Don't make assumptions because Foreign Office Minister Meg Munn rhymes with No Fun. She just wants you to consult a doctor before booking a holiday, reminds you that “drinking and staying too long in the sun can make you ill” and “snorkelling after a large meal can put you in unnecessary danger”.

Hell, I'm not even 55 yet and I worked those out on my own. I'm just puzzled by the shocking fact that “more than one in ten older travellers does not follow the same safety advice they would give to their children”. Because isn't that the best bit about being a grown-up?

Times Recommends

• Snow brings out the inner Tory in all of us
• Hail, Britain’s Indiana Jones of the Amazon
• Hewitt and Hoon – two rabbits, one hat