ARE you going skiing this year? I don't mean the sort which involves lots of snow, chalet girls and the odd broken leg.

This skiing is way off piste and should more properly be written SKI-ing, as in Spending the Kids' Inheritance.

I'm not sure whether it's a reaction against finally getting them off your hands or merely a way of ducking the boomerang - boomerang children being the ones who drift back under the parental roof after careers, or relationships, go up the Swannee, leaving them in need of support once again.

Not only does our generation have boomerang children, we have "children" in their thirties and forties staying on at home because they cannot afford to live independently or are not happy about mortgages of four to six times their income.

We have children who have flown the nest but are in rented house-shares for much the same reason as the stayers-on stay on.

The trouble with planning to go SKI-ing is not unlike that of planning to go skiing. Dare we risk it at our age and have we got the money to spare?

We can look back at a different world in which jobs were reasonably secure and mortgages of two to 2 times the man's salary only were enough to put a couple's feet on the bottom rung of the housing ladder. We feel more than a twinge of pity for a generation which could well see first-time house-buyers becoming almost unheard of among those in their twenties and thirties.

They are our children. We want the best for them and would dearly love to help them. It's not necessarily that they won't stand on their own feet but that the ground underneath is too marshy for stability.

Our own house-sharer lives in a city where the average first-time buyer pays £178,000. We looked at one of those schemes where parents can share the mortgage load - we are not only too old, but the value of our house is also tens of thousands below the required level.

Ernie and Camelot having absolutely no understanding of their part in the scheme of things, the only useful action on our part is to pop our clogs and leave her the family home.

On that basis, SKI-ing isn't unreasonable and we might as well enjoy our savings - but that part of the kids' inheritance is also what we may need in our own old age if we are to protect the house from being sold to pay our care bills.

I blame the parents - my generation's, who brought us up to fear debt and state benefits in equal measure.

* The night mail won't cross any borders any more. The travelling post offices travelled their last this week, shunted off the railways because delays and unpredictable hitches made them no longer reliable.

Does that mean that my weekly letter, sent first-class to the offspring in her shared house, will now arrive next day? It hasn't done so since our pillar boxes ceased to admit to any collection time except the last each day and, some weeks, hasn't arrived at all.