ROGER LEWIS: Most of us Boomers are gluttons and boozers but we’re living longer than ever

Last week, to add to my established woes of pancreas and heart trouble, I was told I have something called an abdominal aortic aneurysm.

Or anyway, I had to attend a ‘routine’ screening appointment, and after the nurse had poked her ultrasound gadget around my big belly for what seemed like ages, a decision was made (smilingly) to refer me onwards to a vascular consultant.

Modern medicine is always finding new things to frighten me about, and I’m informed I fall smartly into this group of Baby Boomers (those of us born between 1946 and 1964) who are markedly less healthy than our parents or grandparents (born during or before the War) even though they had to see off Adolf Hitler.

Having researched all this, Laura Gimeno, of University College London, has published a new report: ‘Even with advances in medicine and greater public awareness about healthy living, people born since 1945 are at greater risk of chronic illness and disability than their predecessors,’ she says.

Hitler is perhaps the key. Starting in January 1940, with Nazi submarines destroying merchant shipping and threatening to starve us into defeat, the Ministry of Food introduced rationing – which lasted for a full 14 years.

Paradoxically, everyone became healthier on the wartime diet. You never see fat people in contemporary newsreels.

Everyone had their ration book, with weekly coupons permitting each adult two ounces of cheese, two ounces of butter, two pints of milk, two ounces of tea, two small chops and four ounces of bacon. People were allowed but a single egg. Offal and lumps of whale were available but not in excess.

Since the country was Digging For Victory, vegetables were plentiful on allotments. There was no petrol, so everyone walked.

Rations were fortified with vitamins. Vegetarians hadn’t been invented, so meat provided plenty of protein and iron. Cooking got to be inventive – though I’m glad I never witnessed roasted cows’ udders or squirrel tail soup.

A lot was done with carrots and powdered egg. Spuds were a staple. I’m told that the chief side-effect of wartime nutrition was increased flatulence. ‘Have that one, Hitler!’ my grandfather would say, even in the 1960s.

But once imports started arriving again, in the 1950s, Baby Boomers started guzzling like pigs. That wartime weekly diet was something I personally could eat in an average morning.

When Harold Macmillan said, ‘You’ve never had it so good!’ he might have been referring specifically to me.

It was good – great fun actually – but now we are paying for it. My peer group, our body mass index off the scale, are having problems with obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiological issues, and lung disease.

Everyone I know is older than their hips or knees, and conversation among us men is almost exclusively about prostates. We fall into two categories, we Boomers. There are those of us who cower from doctors, who dread that NHS letter demanding we make an appointment.

I am always getting them. They bring me out in hives because the docs are always finding something else that has gone wrong.

It’s my own fault. I never liked taking exercise, and when I did, for example waddling to the chip shop round the corner, wittily named Oh My Cod, it was only to be shouted at by joggers, mown down by cyclists and tripped up by extendable dog leads.

I found it simpler to stay at home and loaf about, watch telly and say it’s work.

The result is that I huff and puff when going upstairs, and an Air Ambulance had to fly to my rescue after a heart attack in a Morrisons car park in Hastings.

But I am glad that when I had the chance, I misspent my youth, carousing into the night, even if it means it is all catching up with me and I have had to become a fan of the elasticated waistband.

I was in Normandy over the summer. You’d have thought I’d have learned my lesson by now, but after a lengthy lunch with an old school pal, I fell off the granite steps outside the kitchen and landed in a buddleia bush.

The second category of Boomers are those in late middle age who keep pestering doctors and hospitals expecting some medical marvel to help rejuvenate them.

They’re the people always going on about their annual health MOT, and they think modern medicine will allow them to live forever and sort out aches and pains.

If the older generations – i.e. the ones immediately prior to my own – had mobility problems, they’d manfully put up with hobbling only short distances, or remain contentedly in their chair, staring at the fire, listening out for what Shakespeare called the chimes at midnight.

The Boomers who pester doctors, on the other hand, seem to think they have a right even when surely past it to make parachute jumps for charity or climb Kilimanjaro. The chief beneficiaries are orthopaedic surgeons. It’s a strange development, older people trying to behave as if they are younger, especially when the reality is they are either on their way for a check-up or coming back from the pharmacist with yet another bag of pills.

Because it is pills and the medical developments and interventions that are casting us Boomers into the purgatory of debilitating ill health. Whereas previous generations seemed to know when to fall off their perch, doctors can keep us going on and on.

This is the great paradox. We are living longer, yet we are less healthy and are fast becoming a race of weaklings.

And the next generations are no better. At least we could play in the street, climb trees, were allowed to be physically active and independent.

Nowadays, children are closely monitored by helicopter parents, teachers paralyse initiative with their risk assessment procedures, and in any event, every hour they can manage is spent alone gazing at smartphones.

When they proceed to university, having affairs and drinking heavily, which is what we got up to, seem to be off the menu – Freshers’ Week might as well now involve monks and nuns. It’s abstinence on all fronts, with plenty of mental health problems thrown in.

As for me, I’m not yet ready to board the water waggon and creak my way to a Boomer spinning class. The sun’s over the yardarm as I write and I’m reaching for a large one – for now, the aneurysm can wait.

Roger Lewis’ Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor is now available in paperback from Quercus Books.