Howard Jacobson: I am unreliably informed that screaming for a person with a plastic face is part of growing up

You have to be a fan to understand. I have never done fan. I have done acolyte, but that's different

The sight of a Michael Jackson fan standing outside the Santa Maria courthouse, releasing a white dove every time another not guilty verdict was read out, vexed and I suspect will forever go on vexing my soul. The act of releasing a dove is charged with potent symbolism. Noah did it three times when the earth was covered with the waters of God's wrath. The first time, the dove returned to the ark because she could find no rest for the sole of her foot. The second time, she flew back with an olive leaf in her mouth. So Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth. The third time, the dove did not return. The face of the earth was dry. God had relented. Never again, He said, would He curse the ground for man's sake.

A salvation of a somewhat different order to Michael Jackson's release.

Myself, I wanted Michael Jackson to be found guilty. Not a very nice thing to say, but there you are - maybe I am not a very nice person. I am not saying I wanted him to be found guilty of that with which he had been charged. What I wanted him to be found guilty of was cultural depravity - luring millions of people into simpering infantilism, encouraging them to think fatuous thoughts, and drawing attention to his private parts. Call me a prude, but outside of a private members' club I do not hold with performers touching their dicks on stage, glove or no glove. Inciting underage girls to have lewder thoughts than they are subject to already should also be an indictable offence. But since Michael Jackson wasn't being accused of that, I was prepared to settle for the lesser charge. In an imperfect world you take whatever consolations you can get.

And then the lady with the doves. Think of the expenditure of time and effort. Buying the 12 doves, and maybe a spare in case one escaped or had a heart attack in the excitement. Choosing the seed. Preparing the cage. Bringing it to the courthouse. Pushing your way to the front of the crowd. Waiting in the interminable heat.

And why? She was not, one must suppose, a relative. And she was the wrong sex and age to be a friend. So what was Michael Jackson to her? "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?" as Hamlet ponders, watching an actor summoning up more emotion in a fiction than he, Hamlet, can muster in a life. "What would he do / Had he the motive and the cue for passion / That I have?" Not self-pity; what Hamlet asks it is proper that we ask.

What is all this emotion about? Tears in their eyes, distraction in their aspects - "And all for nothing! / For Hecuba!"

Clearly you have to be a fan to understand. I have never done fan. I have done acolyte, but that's different. An acolyte begins by attending the high priest, but he is on a lowly rung of a ladder which might one day lead to his becoming high priest himself. Not so with fans. If you're a fan there is nowhere to go, and indeed nowhere you want to go - prostration and submissiveness being what it's all about - unless you are invited to your idol's bed, which you won't be by Michael Jackson because he is not doing that any more. Learnt his lesson. Take kids to your bed and the filthy-minded world puts its filthy-minded construction on it.

A person dear to me who understands these things assures me that becoming a fan and screaming for a person with a plastic face and his hand permanently on his member, as though in fear it might fall off, is a necessary part of growing up. You learn to make important choices and discriminations that way. I then ask whether screaming for a person with a little moustache and his hand always in the air is also a necessary part of growing up. Which brings the conversation to an end. I recommend this technique if ending conversation is what you're after: mention Hitler.

One thing is clear, whatever the truth of this: the lady with the bird box is well past the age when someone who is going to have outgrown being a fan would be expected to have done so. Unless she started late.

It is not impossible that my judgement in the matter is clouded by jealousy. No hysterical Corybant with frenzied hair is ever going to release a box of doves for me. That's not the way people feel about novelists. Serious novelists, I mean. The sort of novelists whose works you are unlikely to find on any of the bedside tables - I am assuming they are legion - in the Neverland Valley Ranch. We don't generate that kind of love. We don't induce derangement.

But what if the person dear to me is right, and derangement of the kind that makes you sob for Hecuba, when Hecuba is no one to you, is not only not harmful in the long run, but actually beneficial. A study into Longitudinal Ageing carried out by the University of Adelaide last week published an unexpected finding: it's not children or other relatives who "confer most benefit to survival in later life" - ie keep you going - it's friends.

Blood, after all, is not thicker than water.

This might, of course, tell us something about the state of the Australian family, and without doubt reflects the sodden, sentimental nature of what Australians mean by mateship, but neither invalidates the research.

Call it the law of inverse intimacy. The less consanguinity you enjoy with those you care about, the longer you will live. From which it must follow, if having a friend beats having a family, that being a fan beats both.

It's what I always suspected. Loving what is remote is a species of self-disgust. A way of murdering your own genes. What I didn't know was that it was good for you.