Liz leads the way

Elizabeth Taylor, 71, who, as Cleopatra, 40 years ago, did more for the sales of eye make-up than even Ozzy Osbourne has managed since, is now overweight, depressed, mentally confused and addicted to drugs. It is also alleged that she expects her butler, Jean-Luc Lacquement, to do a lot more than deliver breakfast on a silver tray.

In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles last week, Taylor's landscape gardener, who is claiming damages for unfair dismissal, says that the butler is also required to service Taylor sexually. He refers to her as "the old trampoline". Other members of Taylor's staff reportedly call Lacquement her "sex slave" - although gifts of a £15,000 watch and a BMW car don't add up to the usual idea of serfdom.

The reaction to the latest episode of the Taylor saga says a great deal about how stereotypical views of the ageing process cling on like limpets. A woman of 71, even today, is expected to be wheelchair-bound, addled, overweight and passionate about small dogs - but an appetite for sex? Worse still, an appetite for lots of sex! Why, that's considered positively freakish.

A couple of hundred years ago, most people were lucky if they reached middle age, never mind their sixties. Now the baby boomers, those born in the two decades after the war, who brought you the teenager and the mid-life crisis, are beginning to shift into their seniority. And ch-ch-ch-changes are bound to follow.

The choices on offer, at present, are poor. The most popular assumption is that it's almost a duty for the old ducks to slip into the Peter Pan syndrome: grow grey while fighting to remain 35, à la Barbara Windsor and Joan Collins.

An entire industry has sprung up to hook the gullible into embalming themselves with anti-ageing creams, Botox, pills and cosmetic surgery. Some, however, resist. How baby boomers appear at 70 and 80 will undoubtedly be different from the previous generation. They are the first to receive an education in diet, exercise and the cost of stress. Some also have the income to make the most of that information and the willpower to resist the fixation on youth.

What matters more than how the greying baby boomers look is the impact they'll make on the way that society treats those who have been infantilised and marginalised simply because they are old.

The narrative today swings from the young having to work extra hard over the next few decades to maintain the "burden" of the elderly to, perhaps more accurately, an older generation that will largely be living in poverty, but with a majority possessing sufficient income to live better than previous generations of pensioners.

Garner, aged 85, reportedly drove 6,000 miles in his camper van so that he could buy his girlfriend, 77-year-old Dorothea Maidment, a romantic dinner in southern Turkey, where she was on holiday with a friend. "It was great to see the look on Dorothea's face when she saw me at 11.15pm looking through the window of the hotel bar," Garner, a retired insurance broker, said.

What was Dorothea doing up at 11.15 pm - and in the bar? What was Douglas thinking of driving all that way without a carer in tow? Marvellous for their age? Or typical of what is to come?

Saga, the magazine for the over-fifties, overflows with opportunities to enter the "experiential market" - cruises to South Africa, "gap" years, volunteering in South America. This month's issue carries an interview with Jane Luska, a retired school teacher, who put a personal ad in a newspaper. "Before I turn 67 next March I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me." She received 63 replies and is "seeing" three of her respondents.

"Retirement lifestyle", as it's unfortunately labelled, is the easy part. More complex is how policy makers - mostly yet to hit 40 - are likely to adjust. For instance, work-life balance is supposed to be the issue for young mothers but coming up fast is the sixtysomething, still in work, with a teenager and an elderly parent to keep afloat.

Housing is also a major concern. Few baby boomers, with anti-authoritarianism in their blood, are going to take easily to what has happened to today's octogenarians. Too often they are reduced to living in bedsits, patronised by a "warden" or shuffled into a care home. Another challenge: elderly parents reside in a three-bedroom home that is worth the equivalent of the shoe box in London where their offspring live. The offspring can't move because of work. The elderly parents would be better living close by but cannot find affordable housing in the capital.

In the long term, this will become a public issue because if the parents have to move into a care home, and their income falls, it will be the taxpayer who foots the bill.

If history is any guide, today's baby boomers won't go quietly to their graves: the prejudice which today's pensioners suffer will be given a good going-over. Will their efforts make a difference? Yes, because, if nothing else, some of these "oldsters" will have money to spend.