HELP! I've just been caught by the Third Age Police behaving inappropriately for an over-50 year old. My crime was that I was not legitimately, gently jogging with my loved one, in matching velour trackies and 'hi-tops', to see what the latest offers are in the garden centre.

Nope, I was ambling along Walmgate in jeans, contemplating a pint and a mooch round Virgin Records (if there still is such a YOUNG place now in York - and even if there is, will it only stock easy-listening, jazz classics and songs from the shows?).

Her indoors is even worse - that's why she cannot be let out often these days. The problem is she simply refuses to don the necessary Jacques Vert chiffon, mother-of-the-bride type outfits. I fear the 'What You've Got to Wear Now You Are Officially An Old Person' style gurus are aware of her and are out to get her on one of her occasional breakouts to Top Shop and Etam.

The vision of York as a 'playground for the over-50s' fills me with soul-trembling horror. It smacks of those patronising adverts telling us baby-boomers that we should be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our gracefully ageing spouses on the stern of a cruise liner. With our grins safely locked in by Dentuvice or whatever it's called, we fritter away our well-earned retirement bonuses and it's tough on the kids' inheritance.

Well, the kids are all grown-up, successfully married, in good jobs with no mortgage problems, no student debts or loans for cars or school fees or just living; aren't they?

Aargh! This vision thing seems to inhabit exactly the same world as Ad-man and does a ghastly homogenising job on those of us with the temerity to be born before 1960.

What is a 50 year old?

That's a rhetorical question - and you have to be my age, I suppose, to know what that word means. Show me the average and I'll present you with the full range. I would hazard we are for the most part harassed (we don't have stress, that's a young uns' problem), short of time, over-worked and wondering what went wrong.

We're couples with kids still at school, some even only at primary level, worrying about the mortgage which will run - and run and run - until we're 65 or more. So no early retirement Caribbean island-hopping there then.

Both partners working, often longer hours than when we were 25, adapting to the latest fads of management style and coping - from what I see day-to-day - far more efficiently with new technology than our younger colleagues because we refuse to be Luddites (another reference which may be a little above the heads of the 'Friends' generation.).

We have less money as demands for endowment top-ups, extra pension contributions, private healthcare and the costs of teenagers' must-haves and social lives increase year on year.

It's all very well, these Saga adverts showing 50+ couples - tanned, relaxed, in tux and posh frock - side-by-side on their 'now it's your turn' cruise ships.

Have they caught up with 21st century reality yet? Or do they just do it to annoy those of us who, through fault or fate, are still working out how we'll see our second (or even third) families through Uni when we're drawing our pensions?

If, as they say, 50 is the new 35 (and younger colleagues and readers kindly stop laughing now - you'll learn!), why is the World of Adverts still living in some Doris Day 1950s dream of perms and pullis for those of us old enough to remember the Rolling Stones before they all made it to the pensions' queue?

I can, almost, understand those Florida 'Golden Acres' grey-power condominium complexes. But hey, they are aimed at the real Third Agers aren't they? You know, the elderly folk in their Eighties, not us chickens?

Surely even we will have a bit of leisure time by then, but probably no income or nest egg.

But at 50? Give me a break! I'm just off to another meeting before joining my aged wife for a quick half - that's if she's finished sneaking round New Look eyeing up the crop tops.

Updated: 09:23 Tuesday, June 10, 2003