Hooray! I’ve done it at last! After decades in the sociological wilderness, I’ve become part of a generation.

I’ve always envied people who could talk about “my generation”. It sounds zeitgeisty. And lots of people — advertisers, editors and market researchers — want to know what you think, drink and desire when you belong to a generation.

But I’ve always belonged to that group of people who seem to miss the boat when it comes to a new generational wave. Be it baby boomers, punk, new romantics, Generation X, Sloanes, yuppies, bohos — I was too young/ too old/ too middle-class/ too heterosexual/ too poor or too rich to join in the fun. I’m a demographic no-hoper, a statistical freak who never fits in.

At least until last week. Now Carat, a media planning agency, has come to my rescue with a claim that I’m part of Generation Jones. Apparently my lack of generation status is down to a ghastly mistake: the world mistook me for a baby boomer.

I’ve always thought of myself as more of a premature baby boomer then a baby boomer proper because I was only 13 in that seminal summer of 1967. Still, it’s a bit of a shock to discover that I’m actually a Generation Jones.

I don’t like that name. Is it uncool or what? Punk sounds defiant and dirty. Generation X sounds edgy and nihilistic. But Generation Jones? Thirty years I’ve waited to belong to a generation and I end up with a label that sounds like it derives from a neurotic, overweight heroine of chick lit.

Still, we Joneses represent about 20% of the adult population and we are very affluent — with the highest personal income of any generational segment in Britain, or so claims the survey.

Every generation or social tribe operates a bit like an exclusive club, with a dress code and admissions policy. They are all, to varying degrees, elitist. So I was rather surprised, and a little disappointed, to discover that to join my generation all you had to do was be born between 1954 and 1965.

Such a wide age band strikes me as a little suspect. Peter York, the man who helped identify the Sloane Rangers and runs the market research company RSU, agrees. “The idea that you can define a whole group within such a wide age band is ludicrous.”

Someone like me who was born in 1954 would have been 13 in 1967 — the year the Beatles released Sgt Pepper. On the television was Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part and on the news was the war in Vietnam. The big event that year was the Woburn music festival, featuring Jimi Hendrix. I had hair down to my shoulders and more drugs in my head than the local branch of Boots.

But someone born in 1965 would be 13 in 1978. By then the Beatles were just a memory and the Sex Pistols were on the verge of breaking up. The Bee Gees were top of the charts and the typical teenager was watching the Muppets and The Sweeney.

For someone like me to be lumped together as part of the same generation as a teenager who has grown up in the era of punk or disco is not just inaccurate but sacrilegious; punks hated hippies.

And then there’s the question of the famous people I get to be in the same generation with. Boomers had John and Yoko; punks had Sid and Nancy; Generation X had Kurt and Courtney — who have I got for a bit of generational glamour? William Hague and Cherie sodding Blair.