No, no, do not be afraid. There is no cause for alarm. This column has not been hijacked by a heavy-lidded, coarse-jowled interloper from a less refined newspaper. No, my friends, that is me above these words.

Bowing to public pressure and the ridicule of my friends, I have accepted the inevitable and updated my by-line photograph. For 305 uninterrupted weeks I deflected demands for truth in journalism, and told myself I still resembled that clear-cheeked lad with stars in his eyes and hope in his heart who for years looked out with boyish optimism from this page.

But columnists are like dogs. Five years in the column business is something like 35 people years - while the picture stayed frozen in the glorious sunshine of boyhood, I thickened and stooped and became crabbed. It was like the picture of Dorian Gray, only in reverse.

So I have bowed to necessity and put aside my vanity. We are not boys forever. Time stalks us all, ticking and hungry, like a crocodile that has swallowed an alarm clock. But it was not common sense that made me see reason. It was Michael Jackson.

'But Martin tricked me!'

Living With Michael Jackson (M-Net; Monday; 21.40pm) was a repeat of English journalist Martin Bashir's documentary. I had not seen it before, but I had seen Jackson's rebuttal documentary. The rebuttal was a good introduction to the original. It took the form of: "But Martin tricked me! He said he was my friend!"

Bashir's claims, indeed, could not be rebutted - they were documented on camera in both Jackson's and Bashir's footage - and the response could do little more than reinforce Bashir's cautiously implied assessment of Jackson: that he is an emotionally troubled adult living in a fantasy of youth.

Much of the filming took place at Neverland, Jackson's impossible home in California. Neverland is a modern version of William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon (renamed Xanadu in Citizen Kane), but where Hearst raided the styles and treasures of disparate historical eras in order to create a loopy adult's idea of a stately pleasure dome, Jackson's Neverland is the kind of home you would end up with if you gave a gang of 12-year-old boys an unlimited credit card and asked them to build themselves a clubhouse.

Watching the interviews with Jackson, as he sat holding hands with a teenaged boy, discussing their sleepover nights when they share his bed, it was very difficult to focus on what we were actually seeing. His fame gets in the way.

If Michael Jackson was not Michael Jackson, one of the most famous of the world's most famous people, we would arrange to have him horse-whipped.

'I am never going to die'

We feel we know enough about ordinary people to know that a 44-year-old man should not be permitted to share his bed with 12-year-old boys. But he is not an ordinary person; he is Michael Jackson, and it is hard not to wonder, like F Scott Fitzgerald, whether the very rich and the very famous might not be different to you and me, and not simply in the prosaic terms of Ernest Hemingway's reply: "Yes, they have more money than we do."

It is one of the great philosophical struggles of the age. Being famous certainly affects the way we see the famous, but can it make them actually different?

Fame has become such an epistemological force that we are tempted to see it as ontological as well. Perhaps someone like Michael Jackson actually can be fundamentally different, like an alien, or a fictional character. It is nonsense, of course, but it is a trick of the eye and mind that is difficult to overcome.

Jackson self-consciously styles himself after Peter Pan. At Jackson's Neverland is a vast statue of Peter Pan. When Bashir asks how he would like to be buried one day, Jackson replies: "I am never going to die. I am never going to get old, like Peter Pan."

In 1902, just before Peter Pan, JM Barrie wrote The Little White Bird. In it, the childless writer wrote about a childless writer who becomes obsessed with a six-year-old boy who lives nearby. The boy was modelled after George Llewelyn Davies, a six-year-old boy who lived nearby.

In the novel, the young boy sleeps over at the writer's house, sometimes sharing his bed. The book was accepted in that less cynical era as a touching and altogether blameless love story between a grown man and a small child. Later Barrie became the legal guardian of the orphaned George and his brothers, the prototypes of Peter Pan's Lost Boys.

There have been no serious allegations of impropriety on Barrie's part. Literary historians have accepted his obsession with boyhood as sexless, but Barrie comes to us from the past. We are inclined to accept that the past, like celebritydom, is another country, and people are different there. Barrie was himself Peter Pan, the boy who wanted to refuse the responsibilities and relationships of adulthood.

He was sad in his old age, and lonely, finding it difficult to form adult bonds, his marriage collapsing unconsummated. His was the loneliness of Peter Pan, who hovers outside the Darling family's window, looking with longing at a belonging he will never share. I do not know whether or not Michael Jackson is a danger to small boys, as Martin Bashir suggests, and it is not my place to guess.

He is certainly a profoundly tragic figure, and a warning, exaggerated beyond all sanity, of the perils of not accepting the movement of age. Jackson's loneliness is Barrie's loneliness: the loneliness of Peter Pan flying alone back to Neverland, knowing he cannot live in the world of grown-ups and real people, but never knowing why.