For those who are increasingly puzzled about what the Foreign Office is for, a little enlightenment has appeared. It emerged last week that one of its important new functions in these troubled times of genocide and terrorism is to tell thrill-seekers over 55 to behave themselves abroad.

The Foreign Office commissioned some research, at your expense and mine, and discovered that older British travellers are causing “holiday havoc” and ignoring health risks. Rather like Keith Richards of the elderly Rolling Stones, who fell out of a coconut tree while sunning himself in Fiji, the Saga generation are apparently taking absurdly dangerous risks when they go abroad, indulging in extreme sports such as bungee jumping, skiing, parasailing and water skiing.

The Foreign Office regrets that they also often eat and drink too much, become rowdy and put themselves at risk of drowning after a heavy lunch. This must be shocking indeed to civil servants working in a state-sector culture of risk aversion, in which playing conkers is now considered too dangerous for schoolchildren.

“The Foreign Office is all for over-55s having fun on holiday,” said a minister called Meg Munn, “but it is crucial they make some simple preparations to help avoid encountering difficulties whilst abroad. Acquiring adequate travel insurance is a must and health scares abroad can be avoided by visiting a GP and having a health check before embarking on a holiday.”

That’s telling them – but why should they be told at all? Why should the Foreign Office take it upon itself to be “all for” the over-55s having fun, or take any view at all about their ageing pleasures? These are the private concerns of adult citizens. Munn is a former social worker: perhaps it is simply part of her mindset to assume that the state ought to keep us all as firmly under control as possible, not least the elderly, who seem to be showing a most regrettable and long-drawn-out liveliness and independence.

A wish to control older people and a distaste for their loose-fleshed antics is a particularly ugly aspect of human nature. No doubt that is part of the interfering attitude of Munn and her ilk, but what also lies behind it, I suspect, is a fear of the cost of freedom for the over50s. One of the Saga louts’ worst crimes when thrill-seeking abroad seems to be their failure to take out insurance – with the result that the National Health Service may have to pay for any damage they do themselves.

That is grotesquely unfair to the over-55s, who have been paying taxes, mostly, for 35 years or more. Why, in the autumn of their days, should older people not have fun while they still can? Why should they not enjoy as dangerously as they want that precious time of freedom between the demands of children and work and the failures of joints and arteries? It’s not the fault of the fiftysomethings that that time of freedom now lasts 20 years or more. And why should the NHS be expected to treat only younger risk-takers? It is a horrible kind of puritanism to consign people to boredom after a certain age. Shall there be no more cakes and ale for people over 55?

I write with some feeling. Not long ago I went riding for a fortnight in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, sleeping on the ground in tents and yurts, without hot or running water and, being out of mobile phone range in remote mountains, without any chance of medical rescue. My companions were my redoubtable aunt, who is eightysomething and a great-grandmother, and a friend of hers who is 76. We stayed up long into the nights with our guides, drinking vodka. The most enthusiastic and well informed traveller was without a doubt my aunt. If anyone is free to take risks with her life, after many decades of doing things for other people, it is she.

Then recently I went skiing with a group of friends, several of whom are 60-ish. One happy afternoon we found ourselves, about seven of us, dancing on the table of a mountain restaurant, clinging to one another in our heavy ski boots under the low ceiling, while the Irish band sang Under the Boardwalk, taking us back to 1964. Undignified certainly, to judge from the expressions of the inhibited Europeans around us – luckily none of our children was there to be horrified – but it was a happy moment. Why should we soixante-huitards pretend we don’t dance, when we can dance better than many younger people?

It is true that at any moment any one of us might have fallen off the table and broken an ankle. Shortly afterwards the best skier among us, watching out for someone else, sailed straight into a tree at speed and might have joined the choirs invisible. She was unhurt. Bicycling in heavy traffic in Britain is infinitely more dangerous and yet, perversely, our risk-averse masters are encouraging us all to chance life and limb on bikes in main thoroughfares.

The idea that we should do the decent thing and stay quietly at home to avoid any unnecessary expense to the NHS from geriatric bungee jumping is not only unfair. It is misguided. From the point of view of the public purse and the younger taxpayer, the Saga generation is large and is getting more expensive as it ages. We are becoming a top-heavy society of older people who live too long. The more that Saga louts shorten their lives or die as a result of their thrill-seeking, the better it is for the economy and the smaller the burden on younger people.

Our bossy governments have made the same mistake with smoking, fearing the cost of its effects. I remember the day in 1993 when, to my astonishment, Professor Richard Peto agreed that smokers are less of a burden on the NHS than others. “Smoking actually reduces the numbers of people with long term-disability by killing them,” he said.

If people in late middle age, or old age, choose to take huge risks with their health for fun we ought to admire them and encourage them and hope that they might, in so doing, manage to avoid dying in a geriatric ward.

In any case the Foreign Office should leave them alone and try to get on with its proper work, with any luck saving some taxpayers’ money in the process.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

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