IF the over-50s can bring themselves to be dedicated to anything other than continuing survival, let them bridge the generation gap.

They have a head start because their adolescence was sanctioned by the messengers of eternal youth in the 1950s and 1960s, from Gene Vincent to David Bowie.

Unless they were brought up to wear cardigans and smoke pipes at 17 - in other words, to cover themselves prematurely with the cloak of domesticity - they will be fit exemplars.

Nothing warms the heart more than an Elvis Presley lookalike competition full of 55-year-olds with curled upper lips.

There are no similar events to perpetuate the memory of Bill Haley, but that's because he was the supreme example of a contradiction in terms - a rock-and-roller without a personality.

Still, he was from the same stable of rhythm and rebellion. As far as I can estimate, its influence was unique in the history of teenage defiance in transforming a lifestyle almost to perpetuity.

In his book Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly enumerates those conditions guaranteed to stifle or obliterate the artist's early manifestations of talent. One of these he signified as 'the pram in the hall', meaning marriage and the begetting of children.

I may be wrong, but didn't the bobbysoxers of the 1940s and early 1950s undergo an almost religious conversion to normality after swooning before the siren calls of Johnny Ray and Frank Sinatra?

It was almost as if they were ashamed of their drooling devotion.

Children of the Sixties, however, if they don't exactly behave like the more spaced-out characters of TV's Absolutely Fabulous, would probably like to, and in lieu of firm intent they probably indulge their offspring more.

Thus is the abyss that normally opens up between the generations reduced from the start.

Of course, jeremiads and moaners in general will say that such proximity of character between parents and their children does not allow for enough discipline of the young.

But I have never known a grown-up who was ever thankful for having been governed by a rod of iron. There are more than enough who hold their parents in eternal contempt for it or who pity them for having been obliged by some quirk of personality to be overly authoritarian.

Pity is too often wasted. I don't buy the nurture tosh that says if you were cuffed for dropping the butter knife on the carpet as a child you cannot be blamed for confiscating your son's football when it breaks a window.

My mother, whom I never saw rise to anything approaching a temper, told the story of how her father, a labourer and chapel organist, kept a leather belt hanging on the back of the door as a warning against revolt and bad behaviour, even when she was in her early twenties.

I knew him to be a malleable softy who would indulge my every whim, but I soon developed the theory that his change of temperament was a way of compensating for the withdrawal of parental power, which was a kind of emasculation.

I recall the fuss when, aged nine, I returned with him from Newport market armed with a potato rifle (you rammed the barrel into a spud, fired the starchy pellet and took someone's eye out) or after he had taken me on the aerial route across Newport Transporter Bridge in a gale, my mouth a permanent 'O'.

There's no need for all that now. It's worth inviting ridicule of your Shakin' Stevens impression for the young to conclude that you are really one of them. So start swivelling those hips - if it's not too painful.