There's really no way the Baby Boomer generation was going to grow old quietly...

IT'S stupid to go travelling without insurance whatever your age. And drinking too much and diving into swimming pools was never the brightest thing to do.

But the Foreign Office was getting quite cross last week because over 55s are eating and drinking too much on holiday, spending too long in the sun and trying things they never tried at home.

Ummmm. Isn't that exactly the point of holidays?

Especially where nobody knows you and after you've had a lifetime of setting a good example to the children.

What the Foreign Office clearly wants is to keep the oldies where they belong - in plastic macs in bus shelters on British sea fronts in the rain.

Well, if Gordon Milliband is trying to do that with the baby boomer generation, he can give up now. It was the Baby Boomers who discovered the hippie trail to Kathmandu, who turned Ibiza into a party paradise and first moved en masse to the Costas for sun, sea and... sangria.

We are not the generation who sat in lay-bys with Thermos flasks and travel rugs and we aren't about to start now.

And there's another reason that we're not going to start behaving ourselves at this stage in the game. We were the generation who were always going to be young, hip and rebellious, to live fast, not fade away.

And suddenly we're going to funerals.

Not fast car or drug-induced funerals, but to those of friends who have died of lingering illnesses. That wasn't part of the plan. Time's winged chariot is gaining on us pretty damn quickly. High fashion, highlights or even Botox can't hide the fact that even Baby Boomers get old.

So all the more reason to make the most of life - and if that means spending the pension on paragliding, or drinking too much in the sun and then diving into swimming pools, then so be it.

Whatever Nanny Foreign Office says.

AND when I die - perhaps driving my bright yellow sports car much too fast on my 100th birthday - I hope I get a send off like Kathleen Crang's.

Not for her the kind but anonymous floral tributes that would serve for anyone.

No. Her family pulled out the stops and made their own. The tributes included a Northern Echo, a plate of fish and chips, chocolate éclairs, a handbag and many more. All aspects of her life are recorded there. Brilliant.

At too many funerals it would be quite easy to wander in to the wrong one and have no idea. At least with Kathleen Crang's, mourners will have an instant picture of what she was like.

My sympathies go to her family. They really have done her proud.

Parents are to blame

DISCIPLINE in the classroom is in a state of chaos, says a new report by Cambridge University, because of over-indulgent parents. They let their children get away with murder at home - acting like little princes and princesses, doing what they like when they like with no thought for others. Then when the teachers try and impose some sort of boundaries for reasonable behaviour, the kids can't take it, go running home telling tales and the parents are up at the school in a flash, complaining.

A few months ago I expressed similar sentiments on this page, saying if parents wanted their children to be taught the least they could do was make them teachable and teach their children the elements of decent behaviour.

As a result I received a little wodge of letters from outraged parents. How dare I criticise them? If their children behaved badly, was the general gist, it was the fault of the schools, the teachers, television, the internet, advertisers, politicians, society.

It was the fault of absolutely everybody else, they said angrily, except the parents.

I rest my case.

NEW research shows that parents can pass on high blood pressure to their sons.

Surely it's the other way round. From long experience I would say that it's sons who can definitely cause high blood pressure in their parents...

THE 77-day itch has apparently just kicked in. This is the time of year when people finally give up on New Year Resolutions.

New Year Resolutions? Gosh, that was so long ago I can't remember what mine was. Or even if I made one at all.

If you've lasted 77 days, then congratulations.

You've done a lot better than most of us.

Big and beautiful

NO, it wasn't just a surfeit of Easter eggs that had me happily slumped in front of Sunday night television for The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

I have long loved the books, perfect - like chocolate - in small delicious doses. They are ideal reading on grey days and in the miasma of flu or convalescence when anything too demanding is too much of a challenge for the enfeebled brain.

But there is another appeal.

The detective - Precious Ramotswe, played so happily by American singer Jill Scott - describes herself as "a lady of traditional build". Or, as one critic more harshly put it "wildly overweight".

How many fat heroines do you ever see on television?

For the rest of us ladies of traditional build, it makes a refreshing change.